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About a year ago, I covered a site clinic session where Google's Matt Cutts said that he'd prefer to start with a new domain than a domain that was penalized in the past. He used an analogy that new domains start at the ground level, penalized domains start below sea level.
The other day, I spotted a Google Webmaster Help thread where Googler, JohnMu may have implied otherwise. John said:
No, you don't have to start from scratch, those links will continue to be relevant to your content, so we'll certainly continue to count them appropriately.
Honestly, John might be referring here to a specific site that doesn't have a penalty and thus won't start from below sea level. But I always wondered if things, for the most part, got "reset" when you submit a reconsideration request to Google.
What do you think?
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Comments:
Dr. Pete
10/20/2010 01:19 pm
We talk about the algo vs "manual" intervention by editors, but it seems logical that any manual intervention must be something that would then get picked up by the algo. In other words, you can't have 99% of sites ranking on the core algo and then 1% off somewhere else following all their own rules. So, it stands to reason that, if Google accepts a reconsideration, they either flag the site positively in a way that the algo understands or they unflag or remove some links in a permanent way. Otherwise, you would just get reindexed for a couple of days and then immediately get dumped again when the crawlers took over. It also seems like, especially post-Caffeine, Google is valuing recent links more and more and, as a result, increasingly forgiving the past. So, if you can get any kind of reprieve (and don't go back to your sinful ways), it's got to count for quite a bit.
Mirna Bard
10/23/2010 10:55 am
I am happy with this recent development from google. I have many links before and this is good news to me that those old links are still available. Thanks for sharing this information.