Following the example of robarguns.com, which recovered from the penalty, I decided to set up a redirect for all pages except the homepage. I saw this example from Dima @amazonpartnerka
We whipped up a plugin that redirects everything except the homepage. I check the box, the redirect triggers, and there’s no need to migrate the entire site.
The first expired domain was under penalties and de-indexed—so I removed the redirect.
I applied it to another domain, moving it over using the custom plugin again, which is super convenient.
After 2 weeks, the redirect worked and brought back the exact same rankings as before. There was no boost whatsoever, nor was the penalty lifted.
I even changed the theme, and Google still recognized that the pages were relevant to each other.
So that’s the case study. And robarguns.com, by the way, has started dropping…