Redirect for Google Compliance

[tshirtdeal]

Okay,

First off, if this post is in the wrong area I apologize...

I recently took a bad Google (-50) penalty that appears to be from a few of my sites interlinked... It was not to try an "manipulate" the search at all, just my own personal evaluation (laziness) which comes from " if it aint broke don't fix it"

My problem is that while I separated everything into my 2 main sites with no interlinking my main product site which has gained a bit of loyal customers is left out in the cold... Since I was building traffic to that one product site and it was where people purchased from I get repeat customers... Unfortunately the way things went I want to bail on the site to be in full compliance with Google before submitting reconsideration.

Is there a safe way to take down the site but redirect it to my "new" main site for awhile and stay in compliance?

[goodroi]

your post does not seem to make sense to me. typically interlinking 2 or 3 websites that you own will not cause a google penalty. i think there is something else going on here.

if you want to redirect one site into another website you can use a 301 redirect. this is referred to as "permanent redirect" and it will transfer the link popularity of the old site to the new site. i would not suggest you turn it on & off multiple times. doing that to a 301 can cause some search engine issues.

[tshirtdeal]

Hi Goodroi,

I don't know, maybe it's not a penalty and just what is going on with the algo... All my pages dropped beyond the 5th page results, every last one, so it seems like a penalty...

I am just trying to clean my sites up... I basically had one main white lable site with two niche content sites delivery visitors who wanted to "buy" or look at inventory...

Google never had a problem with it, now I have moved everything onto the two individual sites so that there is no need for the white label. I just want to clean everything up better but as I said I still have the loyal customers who now go directly to the white label... I want to ditch that site and relationship with it but be able to have customers who type the URL in the browser go to my redone content/product site...

Hope that makes sense...

So a 301 redirect is totally safe for the long haul?

[Robert Charlton]

How heavily interlinked are the sites?

How many sites?

How similar are the sites? Are they targeting the same phrases?

Do they have independent inbound links in addition to the cross-linking?
(By "independent", I mean links from different sites not owned or controlled by you).

[tshirtdeal]

Hi Robert,

well I would say they were pretty heavily linked to the white label... I had content pages on my niche sites and each page would link to a product on the white label site... so there were quite a few links going from them to the white label...

It was just 2 niche sites and the white label (which did not link back to either at all... I also had an experimental site to learn Joomla, placing ads, color schemes using feeds and so forth... It was on a different server and host and I did no linking with that one... When someone looked into my site they said it was linked though to my main niche site... I took that site down immediately...

I had many (not so great) links to all sites which were one-ways I did nothing to aquire as well as some links for each from article directories....