Should you walk away from a Google Penalized Domain?

• We are dealing with what we believe is a Penguin-penalized domain that has hundreds of spammy domains (disavowed with no success) and which we've been trying to recover for 2+ years. We'd like to consider walking away from the site completely but salvaging some of the content on the new site via 301 redirects. Is this a sound strategy?

Answer: To be blunt, moving from one domain to another to escape a penalty is most likely a complete waste of time.

Unfortunately, it's a well-known fact that penalties follow 301 redirects. But as we covered back in March moving your penalized site (and that includes content) to another domain to escape a penalty is also a foolish choice. Google now reserves the right to move a penalty to any new domain (something we've suspected for awhile, but now can confirm).

In your case, we'd strongly urge you to continue to salvage the domain. If you weren't aware of the above, then I'm hesitant to believe that you've also done EVERYTHING you can to unwind your algorithmic penalty. For example, you mentioned that you believe the issue is Penguin related and you have disavowed all the toxic links/domains affecting your site. Maybe you haven't disavowed all the toxic links/domains affecting your site or haven't cut "deeply" enough in your disavow file. Make sure to review our following resources here:

Need to do some Link Pruning? Check-out these 3 Link Removal Tools