Can You Redirect A Google Penalty? Probably.

Should you redirect a site that has a Google penalty to a site that does not have a penalty?

I get this question all the time from webmasters. They have a bunch of sites, some of those sites got hit by either an algorithmic or manual penalty. They don't want to lose everything, so they ask if they should 301 redirect the penalized domain to the unpenalized domain.

My answer is almost always, don't do it. Don't send the negative link signals from your penalized domain to your unpenalized domain.

I don't think Google ever specifically answered this question - they may have. But it seems logical not to want to redirect a bad site to a clean site.

Oh, so what about negative SEO you ask? Good question. What is to stop you from redirecting your penalized domain to a competitors site? I guess Google has some failsafes for stuff like that?

What do you think?