Site hit with penalty, how to transfer a domain without the penalty?

[ImBatman]

Hello!

We have two domains. Let's say one is ninja-swords.com. It's here that we sell ninja swords online. The site's been around for a few years, and our brand is Swordzilla.

Now, we also have Swordzilla.com, and this domain has always redirected to ninja-swords.com.

Turns out that despite not having a big link profile, ninja-swords.com has a serious ranking issue. There are no manual penalties, but <one of penalty checker tools> seems to think it got massively messed up by Pirate 2.0.

So, we don't really know how a site could ever recover from Pirate 2.0, and because we don't see the usual signs of Panda and Penguin victims (crap, duplicate content and bad links), we've decided to try our luck with a new domain.

So, we want to use Swordzilla.com now and definitely NOT redirect ninja-swords.com. That domain is dead.

Aesthetically and structurally, the site will be the same, but we're rewriting all of the content on the website.

In light of this: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalty-site-move-18163.html [seroundtable.com]

Is rewriting all of the text/content enough to avoid having a Google algo issue follow a site? Is there more we can be doing?

Thanks!

[edited by: aakk9999 at 11:43 pm (utc) on Jul 7, 2015]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld! Sorry, I had to obscure penalty checker tool name. [/edit]

[aakk9999]

If you have other sites' copyrighted content then you could either be hit by Pirate 2.0 or the site could not be ranking because the original content ranks instead and yours is filtered out.

Rewriting the content to be original seem to be the best course of action, but you must make sure you are not just re-hashing the previous content but instead write something genuinly useful for visitors.

But do not forget that when you do move your site to a new domain, you will be starting from scratch and it may take some time for rankings to pick up.