: Will SERP penalties follow a 301 redirect? My question is if a domain has some sort of SERP penalty and then that domains then uses a site wide 301 redirect to another domain will that domain

@Kevin317

Posted in: #301Redirect #GoogleSearch #Penalty #Seo #Serps

My question is if a domain has some sort of SERP penalty and then that domains then uses a site wide 301 redirect to another domain will that domain take on the SERP penalties?

Example:


Site1.com (Has some sort of SERP Penalty)
Site2.com (No ranking or index issues)
Site1.com then uses a site wide 301 permanent redirect to Site2.com


Q. Will Site2.com take on previous penalties from Site1.com?



Back Story

I've been trying to tract down why Google has removed my website from the index without any warnings or messages; I've checked the following:


No messages in the Search Console for www. www. No emails from Google regarding any issue
No malware warnings in Browser or in the 4 properties in Search Console under security
No malware warnings from 'StopBadWare"
No Manual Actions shown in Search console for the 4 properties
All pages have rel="canonical" tags pointing to the preferred www version of the site


It has now been 1 month since the site has been removed from the index; so I don't believe there is any message still coming from Google.

Though what I have found out is a webmaster who runs a network of service websites in the same niche as me has decided to stop offering his service; I have found out that he has done a site wide redirect on all of his domains and websites to my website using a 301 redirect. This did give me a big boost in traffic and it seems that a lot of the users of his service started to use my service which was fine by me; the issue is that about a month after I noticed this was happening I was removed from the index.

I have no control over his websites or domains and I have not been able to contact the webmaster. My only guess is that one, or some, of his websites has some sort of SERP penalties which are now being transferred to my site via 301 permanent redirect.

I'm also not sure what the proper course of action is being that I can't get in contact with this person as well as have no control over the domains doing a 301 redirect to my site. While the extra traffic is nice as well as the new users reaching out to me using social media saying they are enjoying my service if SERP penalties can follow or forward a penalty through side wide 301 redirects I might be getting a penalty by something out of my control.

I believe there are about 100 domains now doing a 301 redirect to my 1 website which provided me with around 300K extra page views daily.



EDIT - Additional Information

The site only has 63 pages in it's sitemap.xml file. Google previously had all pages indexed and some were ranking very well; the site also had site links appearing in SERPs.

Google Search Console used to show all pages as being indexed but over the coarse of 2 days this went to 0. The first day the amount of indexed pages seemed to go to around half of the 63 pages and then on the next day when it updated it went down to 0 pages being indexed.

Doing a site:domain.com search only shows 1 result with some random string being added to the end of my domain (domain.com/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=feed) Though this also shows a "You have visited this page previously" google message so I'm not sure if this is just something cached for my search since I have previous clicked on the link.

Looking at the Google cache for this only link that appears does display my website but Google states that this is a cached version of one of the domain redirecting to me.

Additional there are omitted results not being shown, though when I click to view these results it shows all the sub domain dynamic pages that are blocked by robots.txt and should not be indexed anyways (This was normal previously).

All of these sites are using a 301 redirect to my site; what I have noticed is that the HTTPS sites have the 301 location set as my HTTPS while the HTTP has the location set as my HTTP domain.

My domain: goo.gl/cEMPSc Example of a redirect domain: goo.gl/vKLKX4
(I don't want this page to be index for my domain so am using goo.gl short URLs)

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