Warning: Don't Move Content Hit By Google's Site Reputation Abuse Penalty
There are a number of cases where sites hit by the expanded Google site reputation abuse policy, where Google issued a number of immediate manual actions, are moving the directories that were hit to a new location on the domain name. It would be a mistake to do that in the long run and can lead to more penalties and potentially the whole site being penalized.
Google has another spam policy that it instituted two years ago to deal with this exact case. This spam policy is called policy circumvention and in that policy, it specifically calls out this practice.
The policy reads:
If a site continues to engage in actions intended to bypass our spam policies or content policies for Google Search, we may take appropriate action which may include restricting or removing eligibility for some of our search features (for example, Top Stories, Discover) and taking broader action in Google Search (for example, removing more sections of a site from Search results).
The specific examples Google provided include:
(1) Using existing or creating new subdomains, subdirectories, or sites with the intention of continuing to violate our policies
(2) Using other methods intended to continue distributing content or engaging in a behavior that aims to violate our policies
Yea, so "using existing or creating new subdomains, subdirectories, or sites with the intention of continuing to violate our policies" would fall under this.