Recovering from a Penalized Deleted Domain

January 9th, 2007 by Alan

So, you bought a domain and its not showing in the Google index for anything? Ever have this happen? You added several links on high traffic sites and still not indexed. What do you do? What can happen?

One issue is what we call a deleted domain.
That means you bought a domain that someone else previously owned and did not renew, we call this a domain that deleted.

Google generally bans these domains as people try and recycle them for traffic, so you need to check archive.org to see if the domain was once owned.

You can do that here:
http://www.archive.org/
Type your domain into the WayBack Time Machine. If you see an old site from a different year prior to you owning the sits, then you may need to sign up for Google sitemaps and submit a reinclusion and keep your fingers crossed that someone in Google will let you back in, otherwise the domain may never recover and be forever dead in Google, and worthless. That process is known to take several weeks to months, so you may want to consider investing into something safer.

To be sure your site is indexed by Google type “site:yourdomain.com” into Google and see if pages show. Then search for “yourdomain.com” and see if there are results.

If its been a month or two since you first saw Googlebot on your stats, then it is most likely an issue of the previous owner being considered a Google Spammer, or just something as simple as an automated penalty on deleted domains.

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