Seeking advice on moving content from a long-penalized domain

[rollinj]

I just started doing some consulting for a local company.

They own a few domains that I keep up and running for them, and pretty much all of them have had their Google Trust ruined when the naive owners paid some local "SEO expert" who spammed forums and bought links to their websites.

It's interesting looking at their Google Analytics.

About 2 years ago to the day, one of their blogs really started gaining traction online. Google was sending 500+ visitors per day from a slew of different long-tail keywords.

And right around the middle of October, 2014 ... their Google Love grinds to a halt, and Google has hardly sent them a single visitor since to that blog. Presumably from the Panda 3.0 update.

Now like I said, I just started doing some consulting for this company.

Before they hired me, they inked a contract with a local web designer who was designing a new wordpress theme for their new blog which I was unaware of until recently.

This new blog is a domain that will be shared among all of the employees of the company who used to have individual blogs. One of those individual blogs happens to be the one that was written off by Google and severely penalized back in October of 2014.

The web designer they hired wants to remove all of the posts from the individual blogs, and load them all up onto the new combined blog with the shiny new wordpress theme.

So my question is this: Will Google tie the new domain with the domain it severely penalized 2 years ago if we port currently-penalized content to it?

I would assume so, because they're essentially mimicking the practices of a churn and burn blackhat spammer...

Ideally, I would be implementing 301 redirects from all of the old blog pages to their location on the new combined blog... but doing that would surely tie the new blog in with the old penalized blog.

I think the only solution to all of this is to:

• Disavow all of the blackhat links created back in 2014 via the Google Search Console
  
• Wait for the Google Trust to be regained and the Google Love to start flowing back into the penalized domain
  
• Then port the content over and 301 redirect all of the old blog URLs
  

Does anyone have any insight or suggestions into this particular problem?

Thanks for reading.

[Artofwb]

I'm in a similar situation and will read any replies with interest.

I have a domain with a lot of toxic links pointing to it. Disavow has been done. It doesn't rank well despite a number of blog posts over the last year earning quality links. I'm still waiting on the next Panda update to decide whether to shut down the site or not.

Can I 301 redirect only the blog posts to another website I have (same niche) and not the pages with toxic linksf? Would link juice still be passed? The blog posts are all clean with good link equity.

Sorry for hijacking your thread rollinj but our issues are similar so I didn't think a new thread was warrented

[rollinj]

>Sorry for hijacking your thread rollinj but our issues are similar so I didn't think a new thread was warrented

Absolutely no worries.

Two heads are better than one!

>Disavow has been done.

How long ago did you disavow the backlinks?

Have you checked Google Search Console for more incoming backlinks since you disavowed the first time? My understanding is that Google slowly adds links to that list as it finds them... they don't dump all of the known backlinks for that website as soon as you sign up.

[Walt Hartwell]

I think you need to come to terms with what the specific problem is with the old blog. Although there could be many minor issues, a fairly sudden drop in traffic kind of indicates either a problem with links, or a content issue.

A drop in October 2014 doesn't line up with any Panda updates I've read about, so I'd tend to think links rather than content. Moving the content to a new blog and deleting the old blog wouldn't carry any penalty with it, and there wouldn't be any issue with duplicated content.

If the problem with the old blog was links, then moving content to a new blog with 301s from the old will just bring the baggage over to the new site. Not much point in that. Likewise, disavow of suspect links while waiting for Google love to return. If the traffic was created by artificial links, disavowing those links won't improve anything.

If I was looking at that, I'd duplicate content on a new blog, no 301s, build new higher quality links and take full use of multiple blog authors.

[rollinj]

>A drop in October 2014 doesn't line up with any Panda updates I've read about

This website seems to disagree: [moz.com...]

EDIT: D'oh... It was a Penguin 3.0 update, not Panda.