Has anyone successfully recovered from a long-standing manual/algorithmic penalty, or found that 301 redirects carry penalties to new domains?

The Situation:

A colleague of mine runs a website in the AI industry. Their domain appears to have been hit with some form of penalty (likely algorithmic, possibly manual) — all sub-category pages are essentially invisible in Google search results, while the main page still surfaces. The troubling part is that this has been left unaddressed for approximately 6 years.

During that time, they consulted directly with Google support and even worked with a search-side developer based in the UK. The consensus was frustratingly vague — the algorithm is opaque, we can't pinpoint the cause.

The Experiment:

They've since purchased a new domain and are in the process of migrating. Here's where it gets interesting:

• When they applied a 301 redirect from the penalized domain to the new one, the penalty appeared to transfer over to the new domain as well.
• However, when using a 307 redirect, users were landing on the new domain normally — and the penalty did not seem to carry over.

My Questions for the Community:

1. Has anyone experienced penalty transfer via 301 redirects from a long-penalized domain? Is this a known behavior in your experience?
2. Has anyone successfully resolved a deep-rooted, years-old algorithmic penalty through specific remediation steps (disavow, content overhaul, link cleanup, etc.)?
3. Is the 301 vs. 307 behavior others have observed as well, or could there be other variables at play here?

This kind of case is genuinely rare among Korean agencies — most of us haven't encountered a penalty this entrenched — so I'm hoping the broader international SEO community might have more exposure to situations like this.

Any insights, case studies, or war stories would be hugely appreciated. Thanks in advance.

submitted by /u/Free-Captain-3913
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