Thursday 4 December 2014

301 Redirect Old Domain Without Passing Link Juice or Referral Signals

If you're hit by Google algorithm's Penguin and tried your best to disavow all the "Bad" links coming to your site, but your site has not been recovered yet, then you might be thinking of starting a new website with clean backlinks portfolio and White Hat SEO.

Of course you do not want your visitors to go to the old abandoned site, and of course you cannot 301 redirect the old domain to the new one, or else you will be transferring all the harmful link signals with you.

So, the best technique to do (after you've decided to start a fresh site) is do this simple yet very effective technique:

1- get a new domain name to use as intermediary  (Example: www.oldsite2.com)
2- Add a Robots.txt file and make the root domain (of the intermediary site) Disallowed

User-agent:*
Disallow: / 

3- Redirect (301) the old domain to the intermediary. 
4- Permananetly redirect (301) the intermediary to the brand new domain



More to do:

You can also:
1- Add a robots.txt file to the old site to deindex it from search engines (follow step 2)
2- Use Google's URL removal tool and remove all the URLS of the old site.


A Fresh Beginning:

Now it is a new opportunity to start fresh with a new domain, new content, and better strategy.



Short Story Long:

  • http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2355513/youve-been-hit-by-penguin-should-you-start-over-or-try-to-recover
  • http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2384644/can-you-safely-redirect-users-from-a-penguin-hit-site-to-a-new-domain