Strategy with a site that ranks in place of my site, and is mine now

[McMohan]

I have a site example.com. For whatever reason it got penalized and Google won't lift the penalty even after 2 re-inclusion requests and has been so since 6 months now.

For the search "example" (fairly large number of people search that) Google ranks example.org, which is a defunct website. I negotiated with the domain owner and bought it. I see I have 2 options -

Option 1. 301 .org to my .com domain. So, whoever lands on the .org domain will get redirected to my .com domain and I won't miss the people searching for my domain. But, when Google merges .org with with my domain .com, it may also acquire the penalty and site that used to rank third may start ranking first.

Option 2. Do a meta refresh to my .com. .org will still be a separate entity and may not acquire the penalty and meta refresh will bring people to my .com. But I will not get the few hundreds of bank links .org has this way.

Are these only 2 options or any other you can suggest? Redirecting my .com to .org may be an idea, though I don't like to let go the .com equity my site had acquired over the many years, plus doing so may pass on the penalty to .org.

Thanks for your suggestions

[edited by: tedster at 8:41 am (utc) on April 4, 2009]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it cannot be owned [/edit]

[MLHmptn]

Why not disallow all bots except googlebot on the .org and keep your .com for all other search engines as seemingly its only banned by Google. I have two sites I did this very thing just because Yahoo ....BLAH NEVERMIND, we won't get into that..... ;>~

[callivert]

wow... the stakes are high. Make the right move and you will own the niche. But make the wrong move and boom! There go both domains.
I am very curious to hear the correct solution.

[conor]

I would move all the content to .org , ban Gbot in the robots.txt of .com and then javascript redirect .com to .org - so the users will get there but you avoid the potential of the penalty being redirect as could happen with a 301.

[McMohan]

Why not disallow all bots except googlebot on the .org and keep your .com for all other search engines as seemingly its only banned by Google

I like your idea. But .org will never be even half as good as .com, since it has evolved over a long time. Why, it is even listed in dmoz, many .edu sites and top referral sites. The only way to get .org to be as good as .com is by 301ing .com to .org.

I would move all the content to .org , ban Gbot in the robots.txt of .com and then javascript redirect .com to .org

Again, I will be forced to keep .org and sacrifice .com, which I just can't do. .org will never measure up to .com.

I am still hopeful that one day Google will lift the penalty, as I am convinced there is nothing in it that it should be penalized the way it was. I got a couple of experts' help as well to reinforce my assumption. But, my worry is how best to use the .org that I now acquired until such time .com is out of penalty.

Thanks for your suggestions and they have been innovative.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

If you want to keep the .com domain due to its authority, why not create a new design site on .org and this way you can get traffic for your brand example to your site itself. Once the .com penalty is removed then you can 301 .org to .com or keep them as two domains to get the benefit of multiple listing.