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.
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...
Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buying a new domain name?
I've worked on a number of link cleanups in the past and you are basically flipping a coin with Google even if you get all of the links removed. A lot of their search quality team is outsourced nowadays [1] and they provide very limited communication to webmasters who have been penalized outside of "You have violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Those who are very much in the public eye like RapGenius or JCPenney can easily recover through PR efforts (RG is ranking highly again for all [justin beiber lyrics] keywords [2]), but there are tons of people out there that are being run out of business by Google and have no idea what is even happening because they don't know SEO.
Low quality links used to only be discounted but since the first Penguin update they can now actively hurt a website. People who follow marketing/SEO closely are aware of all of this, but I don't think your average website owner has any idea.
1: https://twitter.com/screamingfrog/status/420165509296844800 2: http://www.seobook.com/spam-big-or-die
It's the same with other social media as well. Want to get one of your competitor's fledgling Facebook pages banned? A service will spam out the page link in FB comments for a few dollars. Then when the FB mods come calling, the onus of proving innocence becomes your responsibility.
The ease with which you can spam and hack your competitors online is becoming a little frightening.
There was a cheesy TV show several years back about a group of con artists, I don't remember the name but they had a sort of motto that applies here: "you can't con an honest man."
What exactly is our poor innocent small business owner trying to do by hiring a cheap SEO firm? He's trying to manipulate the google rankings in his favor, and away from what's objectively best for the searchers. Maybe he doesn't know google has rules about or how exactly the SEO firm is going to go about, but he's not an innocent victim.
PageRank is fully automated, and probably probes pages very frequently. If you let a 404 remove a penalty, people could probably occasionally 404 Google's crawler and see if it helps their rank to automatically remove poorly performing backlinks.
Also, a simple backlink analysis from any SEO would have turned up these issues and then you could have promptly disavowed them and be done with it.
It's not Google's fault that you didn't dot you i's and cross your t's as a webmaster.
Nothing about their algorithm cares about domain ownership -- and why should it? Ownership can be gamed. If your domain has a bad reputation other reputation based services like SiteAdvisor are going to affect your domain as well.
RapGenius was able to do this in a few hours and they had THOUSANDS of bad backlinks. They even published their source code for automating it.
You gotta try. Good luck!
We are seeing more an more of this. I've seen messages from 'Google' with sample links that need to be removed that are from domains that no longer exist. How can you remove a link the Google claims is causing you harm when that domain no longer exists?
The best solution has always been for Google to simply ignore links that it does not approve of and move on. Instead they have chosen the path of penalizing many websites in an effort to 'clean up' a problem that they were instrumental in creating (PR Toolbar anyone?). The collateral damage tends to be irrelevant to many at Google because search tends to be considered a zero sum game. When one site moves down another moves up.
We cleaned up the hack and 404 the page. To this day, there are still over 100k links that Google says is out there.
The nice part is, there is no indication of any negative action taken by Google.
I think you'd call that a high-risk strategy however.
So the CEO of the company pipes up and says, "What's to stop me from paying $20 to have someone to create 1,000s of spammy back-links to our competitor's site?"
I'm shocked that this hasn't become a more common or publicized tactic. I can't imagine how you'd trace it, and the way things are right now, all the burden of proof and cleanup is on the site owner.
They could certainly disavow the links, but it seems like you could pretty easily and cheaply become a pain in the ass of just about any small to medium site on the internet.
Anyhow, my point is that if you don't do it there's always a chance they will do it to you. That's the main reason to still play the patent game: protection from bad actors.
Spending $20 per month to destroy your competitor's inbound lead generation channel would be brilliant and very effective. Is it ethical? I'll let philosophy majors deal with that. Until you've been the subject of truly underhanded business tactics by an adversary far more financially poweful than you could ever be you don't really understand the dark side of the business world.
The only reason I would not tend to do something like this is that it could have pretty serious legal implications. IANAL yet I can imagine a potential twist that could turn something like that into a defamation lawsuit or worst. A small company would be really foolish to even attempt this. A large corporation, on the other hand, has the resources to make this sort if thing happen and avoid being connected to it.
I have no idea if Google noticed or cared, because I had nothing on my site that I expected people to find via search. I did have one page, some analysis I wrote on how to beat a particular puzzle, that was #1 on searches for how to beat that puzzle on both Google and Bing, and it stayed #1 [1].
[1] It's pretty funny. The page is just a simple page of mostly text, with some tables. No attempt has been made to optimize for search. There are very few incoming links, and one outgoing link (to a domain that once had an online version of the puzzle in question, but whose registration lapsed and is now owned by a noodle soup chain). I posted maybe one or two links to the page in comments I made on discussions of that puzzle a dozen years ago, and have done no other promotion of it. Yet for over a decade, it has been #1 on Google and Bing for searches on how to beat that puzzle. I have no idea why. (I have not named the puzzle or linked to the page here because I do not want to do anything that might disturb the situation. I'm curious to see how long it stays #1 without any promotion).
Want to make a better competitor to w3schools? Good luck. It takes just one screw up and all the hard work and money you put into it go down the drain. Practically anybody who makes web sites for profit today has to look at it the way a black hat does because you're going to get treated like a black hat.
You don't have permission to access /2014/02/how-google-nuked-sports-media-watch-for-a-crime-it-did-not-commit/ on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MnfiX2B...
(Edited to add: it looks like the whole site is 403'ing, which suggests it's probably just a configuration error)
And you can see the 50% drop in traffic here http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/?url=sp...
YOU made a mistake by not thoroughly researching the new domain before buying and moving your site. It's essential to check the history on a domain before purchasing and dumping all our eggs into a new basket, which for you was an unknown basket full of the previous owner's spam.
Archive.org, ahrefs.com, domaintools.com << Not hard to determine a domains past history even for a novice, just using archive.org and the free versions of ahrefs and domaintools.
The only person to blame is you my friend, purchasing that domain and 301ing your old site sealed your own fate. So you're really just wasting everyone's time with a bunch of wining and pulling the big bad evil Google muwhahaha card.
For once, I'm on Google's side here. Party's over everyone, move along.
