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by sharkweek 4496 days ago
Sounds algorithmic and not manual.

A lot of the junk in the trunk of a once-spammmy domain is hard to chase off. It's always important to complete due diligence when buying a seemingly authoritative domain.

From the horse's mouth:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-old-penalties-expired-dom...

Personally I think Google should figure out a way to wipe clean a domain's history when it transfers owners, but... that creates an incentive to spam the shit out of a domain and then just "transfer ownership" once it's hit with a penalty. Kind of a hard problem to solve, but an important one. I imagine someone like my dad, not knowing the first thing about the internet, wanting to set up a small site for his business. I picture him trying to buy a domain that matches his business name or something, and then never getting out of the gutter due to past damage to the domain. Not really fair to him (maybe this is a bit of an edge case, I dunno).

I think you'll find a thorough re-inclusion request here will likely help but won't completely bring a recovery (but seriously, make it as thorough as possible, including disavowing every link you didn't build).

Disavowing "dozens" of links is not exactly hard work - I've had people ask for help disavowing THOUSANDS of links their ex-agencies had pointed at their site.

1 comments

The other side of this coin is that spammers can buy pagerank by purchasing a reputable domain and then using it for spam. That, it turns out, it what happened here (according to a Google engineer who explained after I published this): http://lee-phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/
Yep - not uncommon for spammers to create powerful link networks by buying up a bunch of quality domains, and then spamming links at what they want to rank for.

It normally takes Google a few weeks/months to catch this stuff, so for super competitive terms, it's easy to make it worthwhile by ranking for something like "fast payday loans." Then when the domain gets penalized, rinse/repeating.

Someone teased Matt Cutts with this a while back:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940.h...

It consistently blows my mind how effective spamming actually is, given how much money, effort, and time spammers are willing to throw around.
It's easily one of the best illustrations of how naturally skewed our worldviews are.
Good post but I wish it had a date on it -- hard to know if recent or 5 years ago. Am I just not seeing the date?
No, I neglected to date it. As far as I can tell from my notes it's from Jan. 20, 2012.
If you look at the screenshot, it looks like it is from mid-december 2011.