after removing a whopping 15,000 site-wide footer links. They also dealt with problems like canonical URLs. This recovery story led people to question the possibility of recovering from the penguin by getting rid of old URLs and copying that content into new URLs. Ian Howells did a study of the same on slideshare.net and came out with an affirmative answer. He experimented to see if a 301 redirect from a gutted page could pass on the ranking hit to the fresh URL and concluded that it did happen within five days. What this means for you is: Check your penalty level. If at page level, same domain will work for you. But if your home page is hit, you are in highly troubled waters. Only way forward is to get the links removed In case your homepage has not been penalized, you can shift the affected pages to newer URLs but do not use the 301 redirect. Build links from the new URLs. Get the good links to the penalized pages transferred to your new URL. Before Using the Disavow Tool You should not use the disavow links tool unless you are absolutely sure that the links are negative. Even Google says warns you when you use the tool: You have to understand that it is not an easy job. Determining the quality of the site and the links, that is why you must research well and at least get a rough understanding of the quality of the site before