Restructuring sites with page specific penalties

[baldidiot]

One of my sites took a bit of a hit in Penguin, mainly due to some over ambitious link building.

Fixing it hasn't been a priority until now, but I was planning on overhauling it at some point anyway and I guess it's getting near that time. Tons of pages have penalties, which I'm guessing is related to the links - I cut most of the dodgier ones but they should be long gone now.

So... I'm restructuring the site and I'm going to get rid of the old pages - here's my question. Assuming the pages do have a penalty, is it better to return a 404 to google or 301 it to a page that informs the user that the site has recently been restructured and have some links to popular pages on the site?

I'm in two minds...

[theGman]

One of our sites was hit with a similar thing but it was specific to select pages

We thought that if that particular page was penalised there would be no point in 301ing it as we did not want to associate a penalised page with a new one .

We 410ed the page and built a new page and restructered links pointing to the new page

[baldidiot]

Exactly the same as this one - select pages binned from the serps.

Hadn't thought of a 410, I'm using sh404SEF though so I'm not sure if that's an easy option. My thinking behind the 301 is that if I throw it at an unimportant page it'll pass the penalty onto that page, no? I get some referral traffic through the links so I'm trying to make it as user friendly as possible.

[theGman]

If you are getting traffic and dont mind passing on the filter to another page - then go for it , we had a page that was ranking well and want to rank for that specific term again , so the option of 301ing was not really on the cards as there was definitely a filter set against that page , we had to 410 Good luck with it

[baldidiot]

Thanks for the input mate - appreciate it!