If you’ve ever had a penalty, you know the feeling.
After countless hours of creating content, setting up hosting, linking, social signals, and waiting for the site to get out of the sandbox, it’s starting to jump up the rankings. Traffic is starting to increase and you’re finally cash flow positive.
Then all of a sudden, boom, your rankings plummet 5-6 pages in the SERPs.
You log into Webmaster Tools to work out what is going on and you find one of these lovely messages…
Thin Content, Onsite Penalty
Unnatural Links, Offsite Penalty
Two years ago, this had happened to a potential client who had come to me for penalty recovery. I did a simple trick and it popped back to #2. No links required and no disavow was needed. The site has survived two Penguins since then and still generates $4k+ revenue every month for my client (and of course, earning me a nice monthly retainer for keeping him there). How did I do it?
Double 301 Redirect
This hack still works today. A double 301 redirect allows you to pass the link juice to the final domain without passing any penalty. It’s so simple, you might be skeptical, but the proof is in the pudding and I’ll be walking you through it with a live example.
The Testcase
I have an affiliate site that was penalized last month for thin content. This happens often in competitive niches where some people prefer to report each other rather than compete fairly (don’t get me started). I won’t be giving out the site name or the niche, so let’s just say the penalized domain is dogshaver.com.
The Tech
Step 1) Clone the penalized site exactly and move it to a new domain. Ex: dogshaverhq.com
Step 2) Register a new domain with a similar but different name. This will be the middle-man. Ex: dogshaverpros.com
Step 3) 301 redirect the original, penalized site (dogshaver.com) to the middle-man (dogshaverpros.com).
This can be done one of two ways.
A) .htaccess file (recommended)
301’ing through the .htaccess file is more effective than the alternative below. However it requires you to clone and host the original site to the middle man site.
Once you’ve done that, all you need to do is add the following code to the .htaccess file on the original site (obviously customizing it for your own domain names). This code makes sure that every page from your old site gets mapped to the corresponding page on the receiving site.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.siteA.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.siteB.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Example
B) Through the Registrar
301’ing through the registrar is very simple. This is how I did it on NameCheap.
Doing it this way is certainly faster, but isn’t as effective because it points all the pages of the sending site to only the homepage of the receiving site. It’s not a page-to-page mapping. However, it doesn’t require hosting and cloning at the middle level, so if you’re lazy or busy, this is the option for you.
Step 4) 301 redirect the middle-man to the final site (dogshaverpros.com -> dogshaverhq.com)
The Result
Wait a few weeks and you should see something like this (actual images from the site I used for this testcase)…
Do the rankings stick? For this particular testcase, it’s been 1.5 months since the 301 redirect, and not only is it sticking, but the site is now back to page 1. No additional links necessary.
As always nice post Matt. I’ve seen this work before but completely forgot about the technique. Good to see it’s still working.
Thanks Mate, i’ve been thinking of this concept for a while now — Which brings me to ask if this same concept works with automatic algorithmic penalties (with out the message in web-masters)?
I highly doubt it.
Thy do you think that is?
Well if its a onsite algorithm penalty and you clone the site, then eventually your new page would be crawled again and you’d be in the same situation as before. If you ended up rewriting the final site, then you might as well have just fixed the original and saved yourself the time and cost.
If it’s off site, then you probably have bad links or unnatural anchors. Poor juice going in = Poor juice coming out.
Hey Matt thanks for the insight, I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with different penalties. In my situation I have really great links linking to me but my onsite content kinda sucks i.e thin content 1 2 paragraphs.
However I look at my competitor and he is running with the same kind of content as i am (thin content) even thinner and poorly written and he is ranking like crazy.
I’ve been trying to join the piece together on why that is — long story short I had some really bad links linking to me and I no-indexed and no followed a ton of articles I found to be really thin and so far I have seen a pretty fast change in serps.
Thanks again for your post and replies
Very nice and informative post.
Hi,
Great article. I am going to test this on one my penalized domains. Just got one question, hopefully you could answer.
In step 4, the latest redirect. Do you do set up the second redirect right away or do you leave time in between step 3 and 4?
No need to space things out at all.
Thanks for tut Matt. One question though:
What to do with penalized domain inside Google WM Search Console account and should be new acc/domain opened there or not?
Always make a unique Google account for every site you make.
Do the middle-man and new domains HAVE to be contextually relevant to the main domain? In other words, if my main domain is DogTraining1.com, can I make the middle-man domain PianoLessonDude.com and the new domain SpineSugeronReviews.com? Does keyword relevance matter with the domains?
It likely doens’t matter much (if it does at all), but why would you want to place a random name in the middleman position anyways? You have free reign to use anything you want, since you’ll be registering new domains anyways.
Great post, I’m already in the process of trying this out. Quick question, when doing this do you recommend hosting each domain on a different hosting account?
Just to be safe, yes.
It’s been about a month since I applied this to 2 sites and I haven’t seen any major movements in rankings. Any suggestions? Should I send some fresh links to the new domains or just trash and move on? Thanks!
Hey Vic, I’ve never seen this not work. Was the original penalized site ever ranking? Are you sure the 301’s were performed correctly? Which sites are indexed, which aren’t? Perform some due dilligence and make sure everything went through properly.
Site was ranking very well before, I’ve seen it rank on page 4 for a few terms. All 301s are working. Would you recommend maybe giving it a push with some fresh backlinks? Thanks
Absolutely. And transfer over some of your top links from the original site over to the new site.
Your content i rocking as always.
What rank tracking software are you using?
That screenshot is of SERPfox. I also use ProRankTracker.
Matt, I am not sure I understand the purpose of Step 1:
Step 1) Clone the penalized site exactly and move it to a new domain. Ex: dogshaverhq.com
I don’t see any redirects that mention your example 1 site dogshaverhq.com
Where does the double redirect take place?
Hey John…
dogshaver.com -> dogshaverpros.com -> dogshaverhq.com
Thanks Matt,, that is not obvious from this piece of code. I just don’t want to mess this up. I only see on redirect there:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.siteA.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.siteB.com/$1 [R=301,L]
It seems there should be another step, another 301 redirect
Yes, John. There are two redirects involved. One to get from dogshaver.com -> dogshaverpros.com. One to get from dogshaverpros.com -> dogshaverhq.com. Make sense?
Duh, thanks Matt
Hey Matt,
What you could also add to this. Is if you do the redirects from your hosting. You can add robots.txt and extra bits to block bots on the HTACCESS (except for search engine bots ofcourse).
This can help hide whats happening from sites like Ahrefs and Majestic meaning that any links you could also build to these “redirected” domains would be hidden too.
Hi Matt, do the 3 sites need to be on separate hosting?
I’d put sites 2 and 3 on separate hosts just in case.
Thanks
Thanks for this, I wont be using the double re-direct but I was interested in how it worked for future reference. What did turn out to be useful was an aside of yours that redirects from the host only 301 to homepage!! Ahhrg I had been scratching my head on that one for days trying to 301 2 articles fom 1 of my sites to another of mine as a move (deleting old articles) now Iknow why they only redirect to the hompage and not the exact page, thank you for for that. 🙂
Hey mate,
Great post. I have two questions:
(1) Do you add the new domain to Webmaster Tools?
(2) Do you do “Change of Address” for the old domain in GWT?
Thanks in advance!
Hey Priangshu. I never use WMT for money sites.
Thanks for your response. But let’s suppose you had the site in WMT and it got hit. Would it make sense to do “Change of Address” for that site to the new domain? Will that result into passing of penalty? What are your thoughts on this?
I’ve never tested it so I can’t comment. Sorry, bro.
How long is this gone? Do you have a “long time” experience? Is it still up and not penalized again or is it just a questions of time til it gets penalized (again)?
I’ve never had a double 301 catch up to me.
So… middleman doesn’t have content? Just “empty” domain?
If you do a registrar redirect, it doesn’t need content. If you redirect with htaccess, then you need to clone the site.
What would you recommend for a Panda hit site where the content has been fixed a year ago but still doesn’t recover? So to be clear, it’s not a manual penalty just algo.
Honestly, I’d just fix the Panda problem and wait for the refresh.
I think it has been also hit by the penguin algo since i have often changed anchor/removed links and the rankings have gotten even worse lately. I guess time to do this double 301?
Great article Matt!
I was wondering if you clone your site and move it to a new domain you re-use
all of the old content etc? And what if my domain has received thin-content penalty?
Hi Niko. Cloning is fine because the 301 is implying that one domain is the same as another.
Yes, this also works for thin content, but if I were you, I’d just fix the problem itself, because your new site has the potential to run into this same manual issue eventually as well.
Hi Matt,
I have a site that recently got hit with a manual penalty for links. I’ve since deleted a bunch of the links
Hi Matt
Great post. Do you think this would work for a site of mine that recently received a manual inbound links spam action and has been dropped 40+ places in the SERPS? The site got hit and I added it to gwt to find out what was wrong.
I’ve removed most of what I think would have been the offending links ( sape) which had too much anchor text concentration.
Thanks
Con
Hi Con, yes. This is one of the best situations where this technique can help.
Will this work for manual inbound link penalties?
Yep!
Thanks Matt, I set it up today, btw the middleman site doesn’t need to host a clone of the money site if using htaccess, htaccess is invoked before php.
Awesome! Thanks for the share.
The old domain is still indexed in google after 10 days, what to do now?
Force a crawl.
Tried, still not getting out of the g-index
Hi Matt, thank you for sharing this knowledge.
I have an affiliate site that received a manual action pure spam penalty and it has been deindexed from Google. Can I use a double 301 redirect to recover my rankings (using a new site but double 301-ing from a deindexed site?)
If yes, can I use the same content on my original site? So I clone the original site to the middle-man site, and then clone the middle-man site to the new site or do I have to create new content?
My previously ranking page was an inner page so must I use a .htaccess file 301 to create a corresponding page to page map so the link juice flows to the same URL inner page on the final domain?
Thank you for your suggestions 🙂
Won’t work, unfortunately. Site #1 needs to be indexed.
It’s been over a week, and my old domain is still in the SERPs. The new domain (the final domain) isn’t ranking for any of my keywords in the top hundreds. How much time does it take for the new domain to start ranking? And do you suggest I remove the indexed URLs of the old domain that is still ranking in the 5-6th SERPs?
Sometimes as long as a month.
” I never use WMT for money sites.” Why not? Pretty sure the data they show in WMT is on their servers whether or not you enable WMT. Enabling WMT just gives you access to view that data. Same way you still get a manual penalty even if WMT is not enabled — you have to then enable WMT to see the penalty message.
I’m assuming here, so please counter this argument if you have data that supports otherwiese. Thanks!
There’s just no need to for WMT unless to figure out if there’s a penalty. If it comes to that, then sure, I’ll install it. 🙂
Thanks for sharing this info. It would help you could add a bullet list of scenarios under which this double 301 will help or not help. A few of the comments ask for this kind of clarification — e.g. “Won’t work, unfortunately. Site #1 needs to be indexed.” , “Will this work for manual inbound link penalties? – Yes!”, etc
Thats for showing me this post mate. One question with testcase… Is the ranking still sticking today?
You betcha.
Another question for you mate. Can this strategy be used for de-indexed PBN’s?
Negative. The sites need to be indexed in order for 301s to work.
Hey Matt,
Would it be better to use expired domains or does the sandbox not apply to this situation?
No sandbox for 301’s. As long as the original domain isn’t sandboxed itself.
Hey Matt,
recently had one of my affiliate sites hit with thin content penalty, so going to try this double redirect. However, I foolishly had another new site on the same GWT account and that was hit as well, even though I have done no PBN link building yet. Question:
1) Would the double redirect for the second site be necessary beneficial, maybe to avoid sandboxing?
2) Would I be just better off cloning the content for the second site on a completely new domain and start building links then?
If you double 301 the second site, you won’t have to re-write the content and you’ll get out of the sandbox.
Hi Matt, I have a question about this one.
I’ve tried to do this double 301 redirect for my website, let’s say it’s site A. Now I have cloned site B and site C exactly like site A and I’ve changed the htaccess file as well. But the problem is : when I type in site A address, it will go to site C, which is great. But when I type in site B address, it just stay there without redirect to site C. Did I mess something up or it’s intended to be that way. I’ve double checked myself about both htaccess file and no problem was found.
Thank you,
Something is definitely wrong. Site B should forward to site C.
Hi Matt,
I figured out where I messed up, apparently I install site B and site C without www and when I put the code in htaccess file , I forgot about that and just leave the www there even though my sites don’t have it.
That leads me to another question: do you think it’s fine to redirect site A (with www) to site B and C (without www) or should I redo it and install site B and C with www for them to look like site A?
Thank you,
Make them all line up.
Hey matt, recently got hit by an “unatural links” penalty on a money site. Because of a serviced I’ve used from BHW (I know this because it happened to another site that had just that service done to it and nothing else).
I immediately removed all the links from my personal PBN now I’m thinking of 301’ing.
My question is should I add PBN links to the final 301 domain? Should I not do it at all, not risk it and just order some PBN links from somewhere else? What would you recommend because honestly I’m scared AF not getting my PBN hit – I have some amazing and incredibly expensive domains in it.
Cheers, and much <3 for all the guides you post.
I think you’re fine to use your own PBNs to link to the final site. Even if the penalty did catch up to the final site, I doubt the PBNs would get hit.
So, just to make sure – removing them from pointing to the penalized site was a good move just to be safe, and now can I re-add them pointing to the final site?
Yes.
Hi Matt!
Should I add new domains (middle domain and new domain) to the GWT with old domains and make redirects in GWT account?
Thanks.
P.S. Merry Christmas! 🙂
I’ve never seen a need to use WMT for any money site activities. Merry Xmas to you as well.
Ok, thanks. And the last question:
did you move your new domains on the different hosting account? If yes, so only new domains or old domain too? thanks.
I put them on new hosts just to be 100% sure. Not sure if it really matters though. The whole concept behind a 301 is that you own both sites.
Hi Matt, another thing I wanted to ask your opinion on is would be would you use this for a site that has optimized it’s anchor text? I’ve been sending branded anchor text since the 20th of this month but it dose not seem to be budging. The messed up part is that this same site finally recovered this month on the 12, it’ been penalized since June 2015. I think google gave the trust back to the site because the keyword sopped dance and went back to it’s original positions for all keywords.
Mind you, I did not even bother to dilute the anchors nor did I remove any PBN links I just left the site alone because I was working on other projects. I did not realize the site had a penalty.
Then I stupidly added 10 exact match keyword (I did not know the original reason I got penalized was do to over optimization of anchors). After I read your article called “The REAL Reason Why Your Backlinks Don’t Work” thats when i made the connection but it was to late as I’ve already sent the extract match anchors which re-triggered the penalty (I have since removed those 10 links).
Also, I’ve never received anything in WHT, even when I got the first penalty.
The keywords for the site are all on the middle / bottom of page 2/3.
In a case like this would you continue to dilute the anchors (using something like FCS) or would your do the 301 technique and simply use 100% branded anchors?
Also, I deeply apologize for this huge soap box.
In this situation, I would simply wait. This is an algorithmic penalty and will come off in a matter of time.
Hi Matt Whats about link profile balance ?
Please elaborate more. 🙂
Hey Matt
Firstly thanks for the great advice!
Several weeks ago one of my affiliate sites that was ranked high in google for different keywords and pages got hit by manual penalty due to thin content. After getting this penalty I added lots of unique content which doesn’t contain any affiliate material and send a reconsideration request to google which was declined (I doubt if they even check the site again).
So I decided to try your method and followed everything you mentioned. I even changed my theme in the new site and now the site looks more professional than before. I tested all the redirects and everything works fine. Now my question is that:
7 days were passed since I did everything and I still don’t get any traffic from Google which is what I was expected. However, what do you recommend doing in order to try and speed the process? Here are some options that I thought about and it will be great to know what do you think on each one of them:
1. sending the urls of the pages of the old site to indexing service such as instantlinkindexer in order for them to be crawled again
2. sending the urls of the pages of the new site to indexing service such as instantlinkindexer in order for them to be crawled.
3. Building more backlinks to the pages on the old site.
4. Building more backlinks to the pages on the new site.
5. Adding new post or two on the new site
It will be great to know what do you think on each of these options and if you have other things that you will recommend doing…
Thank you very much
Omr
Honestly, I’ve never done anything to speed things up. I move onto another project and revisit once the new site pops.
Hi Matt,
Would this .htaccess redirect method work with getting a similar result?
Put this code in the .htaccess of the site you want to redirect from CODE: Redirect 301 / http://newsite.com/
You dont have to have wordpress cloned site set up and any URLs coming from the original site are redirected to the new page url (assuming you dont change the permalink structure and keep them the same as the original)
Do you think this method would render a similar result?
Not sure. Never tested it. If it works, let us know.
Hey Matt!
Love reading your content all the time, keep it coming man.
This is an interesting technique. My site got slapped (along with a few others hosted on the same IP). GWMT board says “thin content” but does not say anything about unnatural linking.
Overall, every single page on my site is on page 6-10 in google (used to be pages 1).
My question is, would this technique apply for me?
Thanks in advanced!
Yes, it will indeed help. The testcase in my case study had a thin content warning.
Hi Matt,
Did double 301 for penalized website and got my rankings back. Should I remove this 301 or keep it ?
Definitely keep it.
Hi Matt.This is really valuable Info.
My question is how about to use a brand new domain as a middle-man but is it better to use old aged domain for money site? Is that going to help? Or it doesn’t matter ?
I’d stick to using brand new sites for the middle-man and the end site. Eliminates the unknown factors that an aged domain can introduce.
Hey Matt, just wonder if it makes sense:
I used your technique on one of my sites that was ranked high and got the “thin content” penalty. almost 4 weeks were passed since I did the double 301 redirect to the new site. These are the results:
Almost all of my new pages are ranking in google pages 5-10 for around two weeks for keywords that before the penalty were ranking in page 1 for the old site. What do you think about that? Does it make sense that the new pages are ranking that low after almost 4 weeks? Did you notice the same with your site or did it automatically ranked back at page 1 when Google indexed the pages of the new site? Just wonder if it makes sense or if I did something wrong (although I followed your instructions to the letter).
Thanks
Is the first site completely deindexed?
No, when I type in google site:myoldsite.com All the urls for the old site are still indexed in google.
The 301s haven’t been picked up yet then.
Thanks Matt, but it has been almost a month since I did it so it looks pretty strange. In addition, in Bing and Yahoo for example, the pages of the new site are already ranked for around two weeks instead of the pages of the old site, so it is just a problem with Google.
Is there something I can do to speed up the process with Google? When I can expect to see results, only when Google will deindex the pages of the old site?
By the way, another question that is relevant to other site I have:
one of my pages that was ranked high was removed from Google due to a DMCA request of one of my competitors (although only 4% of our pages were similar in content). Is some kind of double 301 redirect on my own site can help in this case as well? Or is a regular 301 redirect will be enough? Will be happy to know if you have any experience in a similar situation and if there is something that you have found to be useful (I already contacted Google but they said they decided at this time to not take any action).
Thanks for your help, really appreciate it!
Go to the Webmaster Tools of the original site and perform a fetch. Should get it recrawled and picked up.
Not sure if this will help with your DMCA issue. I’ve never encountered this issue myself.
Thanks Matt, but when I login to my webmaster tools of the old site it says that I don’t have access to it anymore and it actually shows me the url of the old site with the picture of the new site… Not sure that it means… Any other option to make Google recrawl all the pages on my old site without using the webmaster tools? Thanks a lot!
You can try this: Video Sitemap Indexing Trick.
Also is domain extension important for both middle-man and money site?
Nope. Not important.
Thanks Matt but don’t sure how it can help. All the urls of my new site are already indexed and when I try to login to my old site it automatically redirects to the new site so I can’t edit the posts of my old site… Did I miss something with this method? Thanks for your help!
You likely did it correctly. Google just hasn’t noticed the redirect.
OK, so the bottom line is that I just need to wait for Google to notice the redirect (although around 5 weeks were already passed) or is there anything else I can do? Thanks!
Do all the middleman pages have to be indexed in google before the juice can flow to the final site’s pages? I only see the homepage indexed.
All the original and middleman pages must be fully de-indexed its counted by Google.
So let’s say I open the url http://originalsite.com/about/. Should it redirect to http://middlemansite.com/about/ ?
This doesnt happen in my case, only when opening the main url http://originalsite.com/
Also confirmed with http://www.redirect-checker.org/
If you did an .htaccess redirect, then it looks like its setup wrong. If you do a registrar redirect, all inner pages should redirect tot he middle-man’s homepage.
Hey Matt, I am sorry that I post here again, however I really need your help. More than 6 weeks were passed since I did your method and for some reason almost all the pages in my original site and middleman site are still indexed in Google. On the other hand, in both bing and yahoo the middleman site is not indexed at all and when searching for site:myoriginalsite.com at both bing and yahoo it only shows very few pages from my original site and some pages which are comment feed pages (not sure why it show them because there are no content on these pages).
Do you have any idea why Google is not deindexing the pages on the original and middle mansite even that 6 weeks were already passed? Is there any solution for this problem?
I believe that I did everything right and the proof is that on both big and yahoo many of the pages of the new site are ranking on page 1 for the relevant keywords in the last few weeks. I get some traffic from google as well, but most of my keywords that were ranked on page 1 before are now found on pages 3-5…
Thank you again for the help!
I’ve never encountered this before so I can only guess at what might be a solution. Try going into WMT on the original site and “Fetch as Google” to get it recrawled.
Hi Matt,
After 301ed orginal site to middle man site, will you wait for google to index middle man site finely, then 301 this middle man site to the final site?
Or you just make the 2st 301 as soon as the middle man site be built?
Thanks very much.
I do it all at the same time.
Thanks, Matt. One more question if you don’t mind.
I have 10+ PBNs which built for the orginal site last year. Now I want to cancel the links on PBNs to the orginal site, then add some new contents included new links to the newest final site. Do you think this will be a footprint in google’s eyes?
People do this all the time. You can make it look more realistic if you create an article regarding the new “branding” that the target site has undergone. However, if it were me, I’d just make the links on new PBNs.
Hey Matt ,
How to do this 301 for post to post, I am trying this and it is not working the way it should. Can you link me to code plz. I want post to post, page to page 301. I am not that techie.
The code is in the article above:
.htaccess:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.siteA.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.siteB.com/$1 [R=301,L]
I think it’s also easy to use the cpanel Redirect Option.. Pretty more easy..
Hi Matt,
When did you move the website to a new domain? September 2015?
Is it still ranking good at the new domain without penalty?
July 2015. It’s still ranking fine.
Hi Matt,
My site is still ranking on top 100, but dances a lot when i make links to it and comes back to same position. Do you think it is penalized?
Should i try this Double 301 Redirect? If i do this Double Redirect, how long max would it take to get back in rankings?
Check WMT. If you have a manual penalty, it will tell you there and then you can decide if you need a Double 301. If you don’t then it might be an algorithmic penalty, in which you should just fix the problem on the site.
I have checked my site on WMT and I couldn’t find any messages regarding any penalty. My site is still ranking for few other keywords that i targetted in top 30. The problem seems to be on the main keyword. Main keyword density is 8% according to Ahrefs. My site has been Neg SEO’ed before and i have added those domains to WMT using disavow tool. What would you suggest me to do now?
SEO is complicated. It’s impossible for me to diagnose your issue without taking a hard look at your site. If you want to get to the bottom of it, I suggest you sign up for my consulting.
Hey Matt,
How’s your test site doing? Is it still holding the rankings?
Yep. Still on page 1.
Hello,
It was really good post!
But ive got few questions if you do not mind answering…
Recently i got hit for unnatural linking… but it still gets traffic from parasite sites which are ranked in top 3, so i want to keep that traffic… and i can not change the url from the actual parasite page as i lost account details, so i have to 301 penalized domain somehow… everything was ok, but the penalty started hurting the new site, rankings dropped by 30 positions(were in the 2nd page), so i stopped redirection… and now thinking, maybe i should nofollow noindex penalized domain then to 301 it to the middleman, then noindex nofollow it too and send it to the new money site? Do you think it could hurt new sites performances?
Thanks a lot!
If you 301 anything that is nofollow/noindexed, then the’re will be zero result. So, yes, it definitely won’t hurt. 🙂
Hello Matt,
Can it be possible that i redirect 5 penalise websites to a new middle man site and then this middle man site to a new domain?
can i get all juice of 5 penalise websites to the new website?
I’ve never done any more than 2 redirects going to a single target site. Each time you add a new redirect, you’re upping the chances for penalty passing.
Matt,
One questions – should I care about placing a robots.txt on the interim domain to not index? Or will it never index because it only returns 301s? Do you ever no index the origin domains?
Let Google no index the original domains when it notices the 301s. Don’t touch the robots.txt.
I have 6 websites that got nailed yesterday for “pure spam”, I’m assuming this is a result of penguin 4.0 rolling out… these sites all consist of numerous subdomains in various niches….is there any way to recover? How would I redirect *.site.com to $1.site.com via htaccess? Is it even possible?
Sorry to hear about your penalty but your diagnosis is unlikely. You’ve received manual penalties while Penguin is an automatic algorithm. Also, I see no signs of any Penguin roll out.
I’m sure it is possible, but I’ve never tried it out. Give it a shot. You have nothing to lose.
Hey Matt,
Let me start by saying that the article is great, but even better that you take the time to respond to readers. Awesome.
Is this trick still working? I am guessing it is since the last comment was in March 2016.
I have a question about the double redirect and middleman if you could send me your thoughts.
I read through the article and comments and it seems the htaccess approach is best. Let me know if I’ve caught this right:
1. Continue hosting old domain
2. Register new domain and host middleman (preferably different hosting)
3. Clone original to new middleman
4. Load htaccess file to old domain which redirects to middleman
5. Register new domain for “new” site
6. Clone middleman to “new” site
7. Load htaccess file to middleman which redirects to “new” site
8. Force re-crawl of old domain in WMT to get the ball rolling
9. Wait it out.
Is that correct? Also, would the htaccess files for the redirects look like this:
Old Site to Middleman Site
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^oldpenalizedsite.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.oldpenalizedsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://middlemansite.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]
Middleman to New Site
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^middlemansite.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.middlemansite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://badassnewsite.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]
Thanks ahead of time for responding. Any feedback is appreciated.
Hey Jeff…. yes, it still works (my site is still ranking just fine) and you’ve gotten everything right.
Thanks for the quick response. I am going to knock this out real quick.
I have not been able to get the middleman site cloned to the last site. For whatever reason, the clone file seems to be jacked-up. At any rate, I will work that out.
But for now, I thought it would be interesting to let folks know what I see as this progresses. Since I am working through issues with the last clone, that means the middleman has been live for a little over 1 day.
I decided to take a look to see if anything has indexed and about 20 or so pages have indexed. I checked a handful of keywords from the top entry and there is one that ranks 22 on the middleman site. Its interesting to note the exact keyword is raking at 54 on the penalized domain that was redirected.
Too early to tell what will really shake out, but its interesting that this KW is indeed ranking in the 20s. Mind you it ranked #6 before the penalty.
In my experience when the unnatural link penalties hit, I don’t see anything ranking below 40. So the position 22 is interesting…
Let’s see how it goes.
thanks for the tips. Normally I wouldnt bother and just roll with it and keep working on my other projects, but I thought “why not” this time…
Matt,
You mention to fetch as google in the original webmaster tools. I’ve done that do I “submit to index” after the fetch? I’m assuming this is only for the penalized domain. Not the middleman or new (I don’t have wmt on those. Don’t plan on adding it either
Sure, you can do that.
Hey Matt! Just checking if your test site still shows the same results?
Yep. It’s still ranking.
Hi Matt,
Can I use a xyz domain for my middle cloned site? My original penalized site is a .com
New site.com > cloned site .xyz > original banned site.com
Sure.
Hi Matt, I appreciate the article and blog. I like the idea and was wondering if the double 301 passes link juice and not the penalty then theoretically couldn’t we still build/blast a high quantity of links to the original domain for some benefit without the fear of penalty? What are your thoughts?
Thanks
You can certainly give it a shot. Personally, I’m not into pushing the dirty edges of SEO and risking penalty when unnecessary.
Hi Matt. Can i redirect the penalized one to middle man and the final site in the same day? Or there is any period to wait after first redirect? Also this works for deindexed domains too or just for those who lost few pages in rank? Cheers!
Just make sure all sites are indexed first and then start the 301s in any order.
Hi Matt,
A few months ago, you had this exchange:
Con • November 4, 2015 at 1:47 pm
Thanks Matt, I set it up today, btw the middleman site doesn’t need to host a clone of the money site if using htaccess, htaccess is invoked before php.
Reply
•
Matt Diggity Author • November 5, 2015 at 12:29 am
Awesome! Thanks for the share.
So has the above been verified as reliable? Can we skip doing the clone to the middleman site?
I’ve never tried it myself but please try it out and report back if it works for you.
Hey Matt. Thanks for the article. What about a site that was penalized in 2012 till now. Would this work for a long time penalty? Thanks!
Only one way to find out!
HI Matt,
stumble your post and is pretty interested.
My network of PBNs are deindexed by G probably by manual review, can i do the same double 301 so that the link juice still pass to the new domain so that i can use as PBN again?
Unfortunately not. A 301 requires prior indexing of the source domain.
Hi Matt,
I’ve done this twice, one time with success but the second attempt failed. Unfortunately I will have to try this again for a third site that was rock solid #1 until the manual slap, but since this one brings me 100 daily Bing visitors as well I’m a little hesitant. Would you check for the agent and if it’s Bing then serve it the old site, or would you just redirect altogether. I guess basically the question is if Bing will rank the new site to its old position as well?
I pretty much ignore Bing rankings, so yeah, I would do the double 301.
So here is my opinion on this. Yes it works, but not for the double redirect. Hint: Google is not capable of going beyond tier 4. You can get penalized domains with DA over 40 and do the magic…. Everything else go figure…
Hey Matt,
I know this is an old article but I tried something similar and was wondering if it was a right move or not.
This website of mine was built on an expired domain and you have seen it too but you probably won’t remember. The thing is that it always came close to second place but never could rank. I messed around with onpage, offpage everything but never came to first page.
So I decided to do just one redirect from site x->site y. It’s been around 2.5 weeks the new site has been indexed but it is nowhere close to it’s earlier rankings. They are all 80+ with major keywords missing.
So now I am thinking that it has failed and I should undo the 301 and try something else or try double 301? What do you suggest?
I think you just learned that you should always test 301’s before adding them to your money site. 🙂
Oh no sorry for the confusion, what I meant was this..
Expired domain that I built my money site on 1 year ago –> 301ed the entire website to a new domain
I have done the change of address via GMT too. It’s been 3 weeks since and it hasn’t comeback or improved.
You lose link juice on every 301 jump.
Hey Matt,
just changing domain TLD works for this too … i mean…( .com > .info > .net )
will it work ?
Yup.
Hi Matt. Awesome post. So I have an issue that I’ve been spending every day researching on how to fix it and this post was talked about so here I am 🙂
So I created a site using a plugin called workhorse. It just basically makes duplicate pages that replace things like the city, state and zipcode. I started great and the site started indexing. Now its starting to deindex and my pages aren’t showing up. I didnt receive a message in WMT’s so it is an algo penalty. I didn’t spin the content or use spintax so I know its duplicate content penalty. Should I just delete all the pages and spin the content to make it look better, or is this a site I have to toss now? I spent a lot of time on it so I really dont want to get another site because the URL has good metrics and its relevant to my niche. Hard to find
Hi Aaron. Sorry, but I don’t have experience with Workhorse (nor Serpshaker) so I’m unable to provide a response. Best to check with Yashar.
What are your thoughts on 301 through URL shortener?
Penalized domain -> bit.ly -> new domain
In theory, do you think that it’ll work?
Never tried it so I can’t comment on whether it works or not. But I will tell you, that I haven’t tried it because I don’t think it will work. 🙂
Sorry to sound like a complete dumbass here but just so I have things straight here you’re talking about a 301 redirect from penalized domain to middleman and then from middleman to new domain?
That’s correct, Luke.
Hey Matt, a lot of SEO “experts” would call this a blackhat method and would not recommend it. Either way, it seems to be used quite often and has a good reputation. What I wanted to now how often you already did it and how often did it work? Would like to know this because people in forums who claim that it doesn’t work possibly do something wrong like same hosting or same GWT/analytics account.
I’ve done it three times. Two out of three are still ranking today. One of them had the penalty catch up to it.
Hi,
Does this still work? and when I redirect using the htaccess file should the old site, the middle man and the new domain that is going to rank all have the exact same content? Or should I make a new website for the new domain that will rank?
Yes, it still works and yes you can use the exact same content.
Hi,
Before 4 months i put content of my 3 websites on a new Website, The new website worked for 4 months with good traffic. Now i got google penalty (Manual Action) for thin content and Duplicate content message on all 4 sites (3 original sites having 5 years age and new website having 4 months age), Now My original sites have also been penalized.
Now I have put some fresh and unique content of 400 pages on 4th site.
Can i make 301 redirect on all pages of website 4 to their corresponding original websites except 400 pages which are unique. So that i can send reconsideration request to google.
It happened only because i read from a blog that the content which you have written can be republished by you.
That was my mistake.
Please Help
Sounds like a matter of Google still honoring your old content. Why don’t you just send a reconsideration request and explain the situation?
going to apply this tomorrow, do you think that I can use the same VPS and IP for the Penalized domain and the final domain? So just a new server to host from for the middle-man. Or should I host all three of them on seperate servers.
I would go fully separate just to be 100% sure.
Thank you for your response! when you say fully seperate do you mean that I should take three completely different host providers. Or can I buy two different shared hosting packages at for example hostwinds (different IP same host provider) and than host the lost domain on a completely different host provider.
with lost domain, I ment the final domain that should start ranking in google after the double 301
also my website has been blanco for a while now. Should I let google reindex the penalized domain first with the content? or can I instantly redirect after I put the site on the for now blanco domain (it has been blanc for about two weeks)
1) All you need is separate IPs. Doesn’t matter what company you get them from.
2) If the first penalized site is completely deindexed, then you’re out of luck. You need it to be penalized but still indexed.
Hi Matt
Really interesting article. I had a website hit a few weeks ago and rankings tanked. I currently don’t have WMT installed for this site, so I’m not sure yet if this was a manual penalty or not.
I’m going to set up WMT for this site to check if I’ve had a penalty message, but I wanted to check how cautious you are with setting up Google accounts?
I did have a manual penalty on another separate site years ago and although I was going to set up the new WMT in a different Google account, I don’t want Google to be able to link the two (perhaps through cookies or IP login info).
Would you recommend setting up the new search console account using a VPS, so that the two are not linked? That said, although I use domain privacy, I’m guessing being a registrar, Google can see who the real site owner is anyway?
Thanks
Just to give yourself the peace of mind, use a VPS and setup a completely new account. As for your question about Google being able to penetrate who is privacy, who knows?
Hi Matt, I have few domains get this same penalty in Sep 2016, is this Double 301 Redirect still work for today?
I haven’t tried it for a bit, but helping someone out with this today. We’ll know soon.
Hey Matt! Wondering how did you go with the double 301 redirect? Did it work again?
All my double 301 redirects are still doing their jobs.
Hi Matt, I had a quick question regarding this double 301 redirect. Does the middle domain and the final new domain have to be indexed for this method to work? Or can I do it without the 2 new domains not indexed?
The original (problematic) domain needs to be indexed for this to work. That’s it.
Hey Matt. Quick Question. I did the redirect and both the new domains are indexed. However, the domain is out of the serp and nowhere to be found. Is it normal? Is it google dance? How long do you think I should wait to see the results?
The middle one needs to get deindexed as well.
So, I did the double 301 redirect. All 3 domains are indexed. No improvements in rankings and it has actually went down even more. You said that once the new domain is indexed the 301 will take effect once both the penalized and middle domains are deindexed. How do I deindex the middle and original domain. Can I deindex first 2 domains with robots.txt? or should I wait for them to naturally deindex which I think won’t happen fast
The deindexing will happen naturally when the 301s are recongized.
Just a quick question. There is an option to remove urls from Google using the webmaster’s Remove URLs. Can I use it to force deindex the url’s? Will that make it faster? Have you tried the redirect this way?
Sorry, I’ve never tried this.
Hey, i did the same with my site, and all my ranks went back! But it did hold only for a few weeks and then it started to drop again. Should I cut off the 301 and delete the old website completely? Or what could be the reason? I think the penalty is carrying over? Please help 🙂
Looks like the penalty made its way through. Sometimes this happens and its just dumb luck. You can always try again. After all… there’s nothing to lose.
Hey Peter,
In my opinion new domain always go to sandbox, no matter whatever you do (redirect old domain).
So i believe penalty is not transferred and your domain will rank again in 5 to 6 months. Also it does not matter if it is single, double or tripple redirects 🙂
Hi Matt,
let me ask two questions:
1. Is it better a triple redirect than double redirect? I show:
“A –> Middle1 –> Middle2 —> B site”
2. What do you think about meta refresh redirect? Is htaccess 301 better than meta refresh redirect?
Regards,
Tom
Sorry, I haven’t tested any of this so I refrain from commenting.
Thank you the answer, I try now three double and one triple redirect for my 4 penalized website (all sites are indexed). Wish me good luck 🙂
Hey Tom,
How did redirect testing go for you ? Do you have any update ?
Hi Shehzad, I will write if I see any changes.
Hello Matt,
just want to write: I tried this method with 4 websites, after a month there aren’t any changes.
Regards,
Tom
Maybe the technique’s days are numbered. I’ll give it another test and then if it doesn’t work, I’ll kill this post.
Matt, Have you concluded your test? Is this still working for you? Tom apparently hasnt had luck now in 2017 with this
Still inconclusive.
After the Fred Update My Site dropped 7 positions.(From First to 7th rank) Do you recommend me creating and doing double 301, or just wait and add More PBNs. BTW i never got any message on my Webmaster Console for any penalty’s or what not..
I’d wait until there’s some actual case studies that come out regarding Fred recovery and then making a decision then.
Matt,
Olddomain->Middledomain->Newdomain.
When I will redirect olddomain to middledomain using httaccess Will it automatically redirect homepage & all post too?
I am just redireting homepage domain link. Why should not other posts too?
Or httaccess automatically redirect all olddomain posts to middledomain posts?
And similar will happen with new domain.
Or I am missing something.
Actually after Fred update I have lost 80% visitors & don’t understanding what should do now!
With regards to your question about the htaccess redirect: follow the code provided and it will perform a page to page redirection.
wow cool tutorial
about two months ago, my site got negative seo attack. It made my site got massive 404 page errors with permalink that containt “adult category”.
example from my search console:
mydomain.com/adult-category
mydomain.com/adlut-woman
etc.
It made my visitor drop a lot. I feel that my site lost his power too because my new article always need much time to indexing in SERP, and all my article in pageone drop to page 2-5.
I didnt get any penalized from search console.
so my question:
1. With problem like mine, can I use double redirection method?
2. After I redirect from olddomain.com to middledomain.com. Should I wait all my article from olddomain.com changed to middledomain.com before I redirect middeldomain.com to finaldomain.com?
I’d clean up your site rather than 301.
hows ur test Matt.
i did single redirection but no use here. i dont think penalty got transfered because it got abused in negative seo (or it would in the future), however i also dont think about link juice being transfered
I have one recent test that is still alive and kicking for about a month now. Making money too.
Right I will make a second redirect in free time then. Thanks
Hi Matt,
I have an exact match domain which was doing well before the Fred update. After the update, the site dropped rankings in Google and it’s in oblivion now.
I tried to make changes like reducing keyword density, reducing number of outbound links etc. But nothing fruitful came out.
I guess the exact match domain is the reason behind this drop in rank.
Now I’m thinking to make single 301 redirect. Or should I go for a double 301 redirect?
Would like to know your thoughts!
Double 301 redirects help with manual penalties, not algorithmic.
Thank You Matt!
I guess I would try single 301 redirect then.
One of my clients has a site which was hacked and cleaned later on. He wants to use a new domain and 301 the previous domain to the new site and also re-use the content from the old site. How to avoid duplicate issues in such a case?
There is no dupe content issue with a 301.
Do Double 301 Redirect pass anchor text ratios as well?
Yes.
Hello Matt,
I have one Question regarding this Double 301. Do we need to use Same Content in Middleman and New Domain? Will it get any chance of Plagiarism Penalty by Google?
Thanks
Cloning the site is my recommendation in my article.
HI Matt,
Great to know that you are answering every query. Anyways, I would like to share something with you.
My two major money sites hit by Fred and I tried 301 single redirection and worked well for 1 month. After one month, Search Engine penalized the new domain again like before. I can say that 301 redirection is not working and even you can change the site address before 6 months in GWT (As per new GWT guidelines).
I am really confused what to do now…If you anything apart from 301 then please let me know
Note: I have not used Double 301 redirection in that case.
301’s don’t help for algorithmic penalties.
tHi, Matt. My website is 7 years old. In 2013 he received Penguin penalty and the GWT message was unnatural links and paid links scheme. After hard work cleaning and consulting investment, the penalty was revoked and the site is fully indexed on Google. However, we never recovered the rankings again. In your view, can this technique help?
You don’t need the technique anymore. But yes, it helps with manual penalties like you described.
Hey Matt. I really like your blog.
What do you think about penalised domains that were accepted by Google to go back to life regarding the easiness of gaining SERP positions?
I have submitted one penalised domain (penalty was not related with me) but Im affraid they can rank such domains lower even if they cancel the penalty. Maybe im just paranoid, anyway I wanted to hear what expert would say about this, I guess you had tons of penalised domains in your hand and you might have formed your own opinion regarding it.
Its expired domain with some good links but someone set PBN on it before.
THanks in advance!
If it was used as a PBN, I wouldn’t even bother. Move on, there’s plenty of other solid domains that don’t have this in their history.
Hey Matt
Thanks for your answer! It has clean links as the person repsonsible for PBN didnt make any. At least that Ahrefs shows. Ill buy next one tommorow. Have a good day!
Hi Matt,
Not sure my question is related, but what do you think if I bought an aged domain with good backlinks profile but found it doesn’t able to rank? this domain was planned to be my money site.
When I search on google search with domain[space]com it not there. but if using site:domain.com I can see new pages I created indexed. Do you think there is a penalty that hit the domain? and do you think this double 301 redirect will fix the issue? if not what is the best practice?
Sounds like you might have picked up a penalized domain. Check GSC for warnings.
awesome .. that’s great trick
Hi Matt
Do you think this is the way forward with a website that has a partial hidden penalty ??
I have a 15 year old site in the travel niche, that has been ranking nowhere for the main travel related terms for several years now, though some of the other non-travel related pages, such as history about the country, are ranking really well. At the start of January 2017, I completely remade the site and added tons of new unique content. But over the last year, nothing in the travel side of things ranks, so I am pretty confident that there is a partial hidden penalty on the website.
The website did have an “unnatural links” penalty applied to it about 4 years back, but I did a lot of work to get rid of the bad backlinks, submitted the disavow file, etc – and that penalty was then removed. However since that time, the site had really disappeared from the rankings.
I have the .net version of the domain, which has WP blog in the same niche, though I’ve not updated that site in a couple of years, so I was thinking to move my main site over to the .net, as nothing I do seems to have any impact on the rankings of the site.
Would you suggest the double 301 redirect for this situation ?? Or would it be better to do a redirect of the pages on the .com over to the .net ??
Any advice with this would really be welcome.
This is only really helpful for active WMT manual penalties where you can’t get them lifted.
Thanks for the reply Matt. Much appreciated.
Is this still working? Looks like I got some kind of algo penalty, tons of keywords dropped overnight and it seems it was because of 4 PBNs that are toxic… I’ll try to remove the links and see what happens, nothing in search console like a manual penalty or unnatural links, so, it must be algo.
It doesn’t work for algo penalties.
Hey Matt – I got hit with the manual “unnatural links” penalty. I’m still ranking #1 in maps for all my keywords (major city, high $ industry) but organic search rankings have dropped 5-6 pages. I’m thinking of trying the double 301 instead of the alternative; writing all new content, redesigning website, changing hosts, IP, and domain. My dilemma is how to handle the maps pack rankings. I’m thinking to wait until the double 301 gets traction and then change my maps listing to the new domain. Or should I leave it pointing to the penalized domain until it catches up and drops my maps rankings – and then redirect it? Thanks ahead for any input – yours is one of the few blogs I follow.
Send me an email. I’ll get it fixed. [email protected]
Hey Matt, should the final site also be a clone of the original? Or is it okay to start the final site fresh?
Original -> Middle-man (Cloned) -> Final (fresh)
Kind of defeats the purpose of a penalty recovery. You’re trying to recover the site that had an issue, not build a new one. 🙂