Redirecting Homepage of Site A to Site B: Cause for Penalty?

[alika]

Microsite A's Google traffic is down by 90% (looking at Aug 1-14 and comparing it with July 1-14).

It is a new site, launched only May 20 but a 90% drop seems so severe. So I am wondering if there's a penalty against it.

One of the strategies used to promote Microsite A was to redirect the homepage of Microsite B to a page in Microsite A.

Microsite A covers 5 topics, and Microsite B is #1 in Google for one of the topics covered by Microsite A. Microsite B has not been updated for 5-6 years (though it's got great content for the topic), but it is #1 mostly since its domain is the exact search term.

So the homepage of Microsite B redirects to the topic page in Microsite A, while leaving all the internal pages of Microsite B intact. So a user who lands on the internal pages of Microsite B and decides to go to the homepage of Microsite B will find himself on Microsite A.

My question is: could a redirect like this be a cause for penalty? Does Google frown on this type of redirect?

There are no ads in both the sites as the sites are not commercial in nature.

Thanks for your help

[bwnbwn]

What was the purpose of the redirect?

[alika]

Because Microsite B was getting #1 ranking and it has not been updated for years, they wanted to direct traffic to Microsite A for "key search term"

Microsite B now lost its #1 spot for "key search term"

Instead Wikipedia is now #1, followed by a government site, and Microsite A is now #3. An inside page of Microsite B is #6

[bwnbwn]

Your saying the only page that was redirected was the index page of B and the rest of the pages of B were left in the index?

[alika]

Yes.

Only the homepage of B was redirected to A.

All remaining pages of B were left intact, and all are still live.

[alika]

I'm trying to understand what could be the cause of the 90% drop in traffic for the site.

The only "out of the norm" that they've done with the site is this redirect thing.

Other than that, no link building or buying. They linked it from their other sites - one a PR8 and 2 PR 6 sites

[goodroi]

Have you checked the link popularity for site B? When you implemented the redirect it may have caused some people to stop linking to site B.

[alika]

I did, and nothing's changed for Site B.

It's been a dormant site for so long. The info is evergreen, but it hasn't been updated for years. So we just basically left it in the wild, with the intention that when this issue heats up microsite B will be updated

So you guys don't think that this redirect is what Google not like about the site? I know it's new, but to go from 4,000 to 200 Google traffic is just not good