[bryanbraun]

The post talks a bit about this:

In a perfect world, when your legitimately good content isn’t being surfaced by Google, it’s a failure on their part, and their problem to solve, not yours. In practice, it is your problem and you have to do a bunch of work to help them see that their current assessment of your domain name is no longer accurate.

You're right, the fault lies with the search engines, but in practice it sure feels like the domain itself is tainted somehow.

[teddyh]

We should avoid words and concepts which places the blame unfairly on mostly powerless individuals.

[deltarholamda]

"Haunted" is actually a pretty good descriptor.

Something terrible happened here in the past.

The intangible spirts from this terrible event remain.

The new owner discovers his pictures scream at him and his closet constantly fills up with blood.

The fault, ultimately, belongs with the one who did the terrible deed.

[detourdog]

blacklisted would be a good description as well.

[CityOfThrowaway]

Blacklist is too concrete.

With some domains, you merely will find a higher % of your emails land in spam, or your content ranks a bit worse, etc.

There's a somewhat random continuum. Haunting is a funny word that does sort of include some variability.

[detourdog]

Yes, but they are on some blacklist somewhere. One could say greylisted. The point is the whatever term describes the issue shouldn't be mystical.

Haunted implies a supernatural condition that just isn't helpful in system administration.

If something isn't working with a service there is always a method to troubleshoot and isolate the issue. Contact the appropriate people when needed. This is how NeoTokyo restored his "listed" domain.

[deltarholamda]

Maybe, but it's not "blacklisted" per se. You can go to the URL and do whatever.

It's not getting SEO blessings, true, but it's not disappeared.

[perching_aix]

Domains aren't individuals. Owners of domains aren't necessarily individuals either.