What to do if your site has a bad reputation
The common impression is that if your website has developed a bad reputation you can fix it fast if you buy a second domain name and start over with a pristine reputation. If your website has incurred penalties for buying and/or selling links, doing a 301 redirect won’t help. You may have gotten a bad reputation because of unsavoury inbound links.
Redirecting to a new website will not remove the unsavoury reputation in this instance either. Unfortunately, the bad reputation of the website or web page in question will be passed on. This means all that has been achieved is having a new website with the same old reputation.
Why won’t it work?
If for instance you have ten-thousand good links pointing to your Alpha website, you would wish to keep them when you redirect to website Bravo. Most of these good links will move to the website Bravo for the purpose of popularity credit. Not all of them though, so you will lose out. The other side of the coin is worse. For instance if you have twenty-thousand inbound links, but they are not all good, this means trouble.
Redirecting to website Bravo will not wipe the slate clean and remove all of those bad neighbourhood links. This means the unsavoury reputation by association gets dragged through to the new website Bravo.
The only sure-fire way to get back a pristine reputation is to start fresh by buying a new domain name. A domain name that therefore has absolutely no association with website Alpha. It is harsh, but the Internet is unforgiving. There is no quick fix once your website reputation has been compromised.
