Partial 301 of penalized domain to a new one

[systematical]

About 2 years back I had a really great domain getting lots of traffic and money. Like King Midas I became greedy and impatient wanting more so I had an SEO do work in it and the guy built about 50,000 crap links (not some random internet person, an SEO I worked with). The domain has never recovered even though I got the amount of inbound links down from 57k to 16k. The domain may also have some panda issues in addition to the penguin penalty. These are all likely algo penalties since nothing appeared in webmaster tools.

Fast forward to this month. After nearly a year of work I am done trying to undo the damage that was done so I launched a new domain, far more scaled back. I wanted to use the blog from the old site though since it had a clean link profile and well written posts on it with at least one EDU link pointing to it. So I did a 302 (I know this does not pass juice) of anything site.com/blog/* to newsite.com/blog (this was not a page to page redirect it just all redirected to the new blogs index page).

Yesterday I noticed all my long tail rankings had disappeared. For 1 term I went from position 9 to 123. I have done almost no link building. I have built 4 links (all legitimate related sites), with 1 link coming from the home page of the old penalized domain (which is still a pr4 related domain).

Any ideas why this may have happened? Was it a bad idea to 302 the blog? Should I have done a 301 mapping each page to the new domain instead? Is Google confused believing their is a duplicate content issue? Is this just a short blip? Any ideas?

[JD_Toims]

So I did a 302 (I know this does not pass juice) of anything site.com/blog/* to newsite.com/blog (this was not a page to page redirect it just all redirected to the new blogs index page).

I'm not sure about that. Since the 302 "bug" years ago Google has adjusted their handling of 302s to be almost identical to 301s, much the same way they treat a short meta refresh as a 301. Basically, as far as I know, have heard or have seen in any type of testing it takes longer for a 302 to be "trusted" as permanent, but if it's in place long enough it will likely be treated as a 301.

Any ideas why this may have happened?

This:

(this was not a page to page redirect it just all redirected to the new blogs index page)

Google treats "bulk redirects" to a single page that's not "essentially the same as the original" as a soft-404 error, which is about the same as a 404 [meaning all link weight is dropped AFAIK] even though the 404 status code is missing, so in-my-opinion it's likely the bulk redirect to a single page rather than a page-to-page redirect that's causing the issue, not the status code being used.

BTW: Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

[systematical]

@JD_Toims. Thanks for the reply and welcome. I have adjusted the 302 bulk redirect to be a 301 page-to-page redirect.

Do you see any other problems with this strategy? Is it worth it just for the blog or should I give up any thing related to that old domain. It's crushing knowing what that domain was doing at one point.

[JD_Toims]

Is it worth it just for the blog or should I give up any thing related to that old domain. It's crushing knowing what that domain was doing at one point.

I'd wait and see what happens with a page-to-page redirect. If you don't get anything out of it after 2 weeks or so [Google takes some time to totally trust (transfer all scoring through) a redirect these days since they are changed so much] then I'd personally pull the redirect and just use the content. I don't see any reason to not use the content if it's topical, well [naturally] written and useful for visitors though.

[systematical]

One note I want to be clear of is that I am not referring to the long tail rankings of the blog. I am referring to portions of my new site that area unrelated to the blog which have lost rankings.

That I can't understand...