Banned Site 301ing as Ammunition

Can you hurt a site with a banned site through a 301? That’s the question posed in a Search Engine Watch thread on the subject:

If you 301 a banned domain to a domain that ranks well and is not banned the banned domain will not hurt the other domain.

If that were the case, then I could get one of my domains banned, 301 it to my competitor and hurt their site and their rankings.

More:

I’ve done it and it doesn’t work.

I’ve also seen the results of some other interesting tests done, like this one:

1.Buy domain. (or use existing domain)

2.Change all the whois information so it has a competitor’s contact details listed.

3.Put the nastiest most spammy pages on it, like pages with 5000 of the same anchor text links that point to that competitor’s site.

4.Let that spammy site sit for a while and get indexed.

The results? It doesn’t hurt the competitor’s rankings, even though the site is “owned” by the competitor and links to their site.

The bottom line is that there doesn’t appear to be anything you can do to hurt a competitor, even if you 301 redirect a banned site to another site.

Looks like a consensus:

I just can’t disagree with.

I know Matt Cutts from Google said at a previous SES in London (2004) in a Q&A session that you can’t really help who links to your site but you can help who you link to so I can only guess the same has to apply.

Though this would be an interesting test…