Can A 301 Redirect Save Your Site’s Bad Reputation?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

If you have a website that has been penalized for selling or buying links, can you buy a second domain name and redirect the first site to it so that you start fresh again with a new reputation? No, I don’t think you can. 301 redirects typically pass along the reputation of the old website or web page so that the page being redirected to inherits that reputation.

Let’s say you’ve got site A that has 100,000 links pointing to it. They are all good links. If you redirect site A to site B then most of those 100,000 links will be credited to site B for link popularity purposes. Most, but probably not all.

On the other hand, let’s say you’ve 50,000 inbound links and a good number of those are from bad neighborhoods. Site A now has a bad reputation due to its associations. You shouldn’t expect that redirecting site A to site B will erase that bad reputation because chances are your inbound links will pass along that reputation to the new site. You’ll get credit for most of your 50,000 inbound links at site B. If those links are all good links then no problem. But if any percentage of them are bad links, or links from bad neighborhoods, then you are likely to have the same bad reputation at site B that you had at site A. Your best bet is to buy a new domain name and not associate it with site A at all.