In a webmaster hangout on Google+ this morning, Google's John Mueller basically said there is no good way to redirect a web site that has a penalty to a new web site without a penalty and not risk the new web site being penalized.
The question came up at the 7:02 mark where a webmaster asked:
Is there a safe way you can redirect people from the old web site (the one with a penalty) without worrying about any negative effect being passed on? Maybe robot it out, nofollow link or something like that?
John responded:
That is kind of a tricky situation because on the one hand you want to say I want to redirect everyone to my new web site and on the other hand, you are saying I don’t want people to really recognize that they are being redirected.I don’t know if I have any great advice there other than doing crazy stuff which you probably… I don’t know if you really want to do that. I mean, you’ve probably seen a lot of those tricks already.
He later explained:
It gets very close to cloaking, where you are saying users see this behavior and search engines see something completely different. And that is something I’d try to avoid. It goes against the webmaster guidelines. So maybe a pop up like you have it now is your best approach at the moment.
So cloak? :)
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at Google+.
