Have you bought a domain name, without doing the proper domain name due diligence, and put a developed it–to then find out that it’s banned in Google or has a search engine penalty? Well, according to a recent post a Search Engine Roundtable, there are people discussing this very issue.
The recommendation is to just get rid of that domain name and forget about it. Or use it for spam (the horror!). They recommend that you just use another domain name.
Well, if you might recall, I wrote two years ago about how ZDNet bought a domain name at GoDaddy’s expired domain name auctions. And, the domain name was banned in Google. ZDNet learned of the search engine penalty after they moved their existing website to the new domain name. They lost traffic from Google organic search. Turns out that the domain name already had a manual action associated with it because the previous owner used it for search engine spam.
All the new domain name owner had to do was submit a reconsideration request with Google. Google will manually look at the domain name, the website associated with it, and verify that the site is, in fact, owned by someone else. Within days this can happen–you can get rid of a manual action (penalty) from Google if you buy a domain name and it has a search engine penalty.
The “advice” given by others regarding giving up on a domain name name that has a search engine penalty is bad advice. Granted, if you wanted to stay “under Google’s radar” and not verify the site with Google’s Search Console and ask for a reconsideration request, you might want to do that. But for us folks that do everything in a “white hat” way (cough, cough), simply filing a reconsideration request will take care of the problem.
