301 Redirect Yahoo Banned Domain to New Domain

Will our New Site be Safe from Yahoo Penalties?

[chrisandsarah]

We've had a fairly successful site up for around 5 years now, but it picked up a penalty around 12 months ago with Yahoo, and can't be found in yahoo anymore.
Lets call this established site regionalwidgets.com
We also have another domain name registered, which is an obvious expansion on the above domain, lets call it worldwidgets.com, and we'd like to use it to expand our business and build a new site with. Now would be an ideal time, as the old site has penalties.

Our plan would be to launch worldwidgets.com, with 301 permanent redirects from the already established site - regionalwidgets.

Will any penalties from regionalwidgets be carried over to the new worldwidgets if the search engines see it is the same company? or will the new site be ok. We dont want to risk doing this, if the new site gets tarred with the same brush as the old. We will learn from our mistakes and keep the new site totally clean.

Would it be best not to use 301 redirects from the old as this would link the two sites?

Thanks for any information

[Xstnva]

From what it sounds, you are wanting to get away from the first site and move to the second site. If this is true, then a 301 redirect would be best. As for the penalties, I think this depends on what they are. I would try to correct any errors so when you switch, there would be no reason for penalties.

If you don't mind, what did you get penalized for?

[chrisandsarah]

Not entirely sure why we got penalized. I think it was for inter-linking between sites, so I fixed that, resubmitted to yahoo but was told still the site did not comply. Was also told they would only review it once more! So havent resubmitted it just yet.
I think it may be over optimised, excessive use of internal links, keyword saturated etc and I have a HUGE reciprical links section. I'm going to fix all these problems (some are sorted already) and then launch under the new domain.
I have some great ranking for certain things on google, but will sacrifice to get new domain up and keep a clean sheet from now on and hopefully get the new domain listed in all the search engines again. We have slipped down in google too for 90% of our terms so now is probably the right time to launch on a new domain. I'm just worried a 301 might be saying to the search engines 'hey - this banned site now exists at this new address -->!" :-(

[Xstnva]

I do understand your concern. I am not a big fan of reciprocal links. I feel that 9 times out of 10, then ended up hurting the site. In my opinion, I think that if you cleaned your site up and implemented a 301 then this would work. It like saying "Ok, I messed up and now here I am, new and refreshed". (Again, personal opinion)

[F_Rose]

My post is a little off topic, but maybe you guys can help us out.
We have had a history with Yahoo and the story goes as follows:
Approx. a year ago our site was doing great on Yahoo we where listed for most of our major keywords, we had loads of traffic from yahoo as well as conversions.
After a few months everything went black, we had spamming issues on our site and Yahoo has banned us.
We have decided to do a total redesign on our site for SEO purposes, and of course we made it a lot more user freindly as well.
At the SES show I met some guys from Yahoo explained them our situation and asked them to release our site and start indexing our site being that we have fixed all of our outstanding issues. Beleive it or not a few day after the SES show we started seeing our site back in Yahoo.
We are not ranked very well though, we are in thier database for our major keywords, but the position is pretty low. The status is not changing though we are in the same position for the past 2 months.

Is thier anything we can do to give our rankings a boost? Is it something we need to wait and just give it time?

If thier is something that could be done, I would like to know. Please advise.

[chrisandsarah]

More problems. Here is the situation..

Domain1 is an existing site and has Yahoo penalty.
DomainX is a similiar domain name to Domain1, but has never been used. I brought it to keep competitors from having it.

Due to penalty on Domain1, i decide to make use of DomainX which has never been used for a site yet, but has been parked up and using 'framed web-forwarding' to point to Domain1, incase anyone should type it in to a browser address bar.

I have now discovered that Yahoo has DomainX in its index!, (if clicked on user goes to site Domain1 content but url is replaced with DomainX/filexx)
Someone must have linked to domain1 but typed in domainX as the domain name instead when creating the link (they are very similiar names) and so the search engines then picked it up

I hope this all makes sense.
So DomainX should not be in yahoo as I have never used it, only parked it up and had it pointing to domain1 if typed into a browser.
Now though, with it somehow getting indexed in Yahoo, i fear this domainX also has a penalty before i have even used it!
Yahoo will only show me the homepage (sign of a penalty?)
DomainX is also listed in google, again just the homepage with no PR.
This is devastating as it was a domain name i was planning to use to expand my current site with but now its porbably not worth using at all.
Will this domain have been penalised even though it was just framed web-forwarding, not an actual site? (although did show domain1's content if used)

Does anyone know?

Many thanks

[Xstnva]

"...so it have become a twisted turn of events"

Well, there are a few options (IMO) FIRST! FIX THE PROBLEM THAT CAUSED THE PENALITY. I would have your designer focus on that and make it priority. Second, if you don't want Domain X to get index, you could always implement a "no index" tag. This will tell the engine's simply not to index the site.