Penguin Penalty - Best strategy to transfer site to a new domain

[BlueDanube]

I have acquired a Penguin 2 penalty and, I suspect, at least one Panda in recent months. Traffic has dropped by around 85%.

I'm thinking about transferring the site to a new domain and wondered how best to do that without any penalty being transferred by, say a 301.

What are your thoughts on steps I should take?. How do I prevent Google identifying 2 sites with similar content for example?.

[goodroi]

Transferring the domain is not likely to address the main reasons why you were impacted by penguin. If your current content was not good enough to gain backlinks from authoritative websites then why reuse it at a new domain?

Transferring to a new domain can help if you are trying to rebrand the site and have ideas on how to better run your site. If you are looking to use a 301 as a quick trick to get around penguin you are unlikely to be happy with the results.

Don't forget Google has many ways to connect websites. They are a domain registrar, so they can see all the domains with the same whois. They can also see all the domains using the same Adsense or Analytics code.

[idolw]

How do you know if the site was hit due to a penalty and not because the links were devalued?

[BlueDanube]

Thanks for your thoughts guys.

The site in question was not a thin site but had pages of original content and videos. Prior to mid-March traffic was incrasing organically and exponentially but...I had arranged some links from a 'Panda and Penguin safe' SEO provider.

Mid March saw a 60% fall in traffic over a period of 2 or 3 days. Many downgraded pages but some still ranking well.

May saw a further decline as P2 was rolled out and the survivor pages were then downgraded and are no floating from 40-80 in the SERPS.

Whether this resulted from a Penalty or devaluation of links is unknown to me at the moment. I'm trying to decide whether the position is recoverable or whether a new site is in order.