Moving To A New Domain To Escape A Google Penalty Might Not Work Says Google

This isn't exactly new, news - I covered this in 2014, but with the news around Dejan getting hit badly by a manual action, his plan is to move to a new domain and not redirect the old domain to the new. But John Mueller from Google rained on his parade, if you can call it a parade, by saying Google will find you.

John Mueller from Google said "Just to state the obvious, since the sites are the same, Google will treat them the same & pick a canonical for the combined signals. You don't necessarily need to do a 301 to have it be seen as a site move."

Here are the tweets:

My biggest SEO experiment has just begun!

1. New domain: https://t.co/RuH0lOmkwK
2. Will not 301 anything.
3. Will ask everyone to update links.

After this I expect maybe 20% of my previous link profile at least, up to 50% if I'm lucky.

— DEJAN (@dejanseo) August 24, 2019

John responds:

Just to state the obvious, since the sites are the same, Google will treat them the same & pick a canonical for the combined signals. You don't necessarily need to do a 301 to have it be seen as a site move.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 26, 2019

Dan responds:

Thank you John, I wrote about the effect here https://t.co/PFjK8oJXGe and of course we are still very busy trying to understand what caused the penalty. The contribution I made to the disavow file so far isn't good enough in my opinion for me to submit a reconsideration request.

— DEJAN (@dejanseo) August 26, 2019

Then someone else chimed in with more questions:

Canonicalization uses more than just external links, but happy to forward examples to the team if you see anything problematic happening in that regard.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 26, 2019

This will be a super interesting case study for the SEO community when it is all set and done - if it is can ever truly be "done."

Here is Dejan's response to this story with my thoughts:

well, this is manual, so super easy since you documented the move.

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 26, 2019

This usually applies to folks that want to keep their practices, and don't change anything on the new domain.

Unless there's an algorithmic canonical intervention, there wouldn't be much to worry here

— Pedro Dias: ~/pedro$ (@pedrodias) August 26, 2019

Forum discussion at Twitter.