MrSavage - 5:52 pm on Oct 4, 2009 (gmt 0)

Thanks jd01. I will give your comments some real thought. I appreciate your time and advice on this. The advice that was given to me from the Google employee was certainly not meant as harmful to me, however, I'm overly cautious. I know they suggested this as a means to possibly clear up a penalty, however they didn't mention whether that penalized 301 domain will pass value onto my chosen domain.

I hear what you are saying about what's the risk since it's not ranking now anyways. This is true, however, a 301 isn't the only option. I can also just remove Google from crawling this site all together. That's a last resort really. It has value, and it has backlinks. These are valuable enough to not throw away on a 301 which doesn't give me that value passed onto the new domain.

I've made tough decisions on other sites, and simply 301 them, however, I'm now onto valuable domains. It's much harder to have say, a $100 bill and throwing it into the wash and hoping that the $100 bill still has the value. Make sense? Throwing it into the wash means it may come out as a blank piece of paper.