Google Pure Spam Penalty

[jmcdougall17]

I'm hoping someone can help me with this. I am very new to web development but have been doing alot of reading on development and SEO lately. Anyways, I purchased a domain name in a niche that I wanted to target. Whild looking to purchase a name I was looking for high Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Trust factors from Majestic. I found a site that I thought fit the bill. This site was on Godaddy Expiring Auctions so when I obtained it it Kept its Whois Registration date of 2008 and the name was switched over to me.

Excited, I immediately started working on the site. I had purchased a premium Wordpress theme that I thought I could make look very professional, imported the dummy data for the theme (data that could be changed to fit my needs) and entered my sites information into Google Webmaster Tools. A few day's later and the site was looking great, I checked my Google Webmaster tools and it says Site May Not be Indexed under Manual Actions it says "PURE SPAM" -

Oh No, where did I go wrong! I thought that maybe since Google had crawled the site and saw the dummy data that it was interpreting this as pure spam. I than checked the Wayback Archive for the site and noticed that over the last couple years the site had changed from its previous incantation to something different. It had TONS of Niche related stories that I believe were probably spun content. Reading through the stories they were quite poorly written, so I believe this must be the reason for Googles Manual Action.

Anyways, I put in a reconsideration request with Google since the content that I am putting on the site is all original written by me. But I am now concerned about a few things:
1.) If google accepts my reconsideration, will my existing backlinks still be viable and hold the same Authority?
2.) If google denies my reconsideration, should I be putting content on this site at all? I still want my content hosted somewhere, even if I have to start with a new domain name.
3.) If google denies, and i buy new domain, and put all my content from my current site at new domain, will Google now view the content as DUPLICATE content?

So frustrated. I thought I did my do diligence but obviously did not. I checked Wayback before buying but only skimmed through everything at that time

Thanks for the help!

 

[enlytend]

Before you submitted the recon request, hopefully you went over every one of Google's quality guidelines and made sure not a single one pertained to your site? If not, you submitted prematurely and will probably be denied.

If you still had dummy data and not your own content, you will probably be denied.

Pure Spam is the most severe manual penalty you can get, so will be subject to close scrutiny - if you have bad backlinks, they could lift the "pure spam" and give you an "unnatural links" in its place. If you have dodgy backlinks, you should remove as many as possible and disavow the rest (BEFORE you submit the recon request.)

Because of the severity, starting with a clean domain may be the easiest and quickest route. If the copy on the "bad" domain is taken down, should be no duplicate content issues.

FYI: Google's point-of-view on a Pure Spam penalty - http://searchenginewatch.com/articl...pam-Manual-Action-Matt-Cutts-on-How-to-Fix-it

PS (and this is something I'd bet most domainers don't do!) When you buy an expired domain you should look at the previous content AND detailed information about links pointing to it - the sites they're from, how quickly they were acquired, anchor text, etc. - to see if it was previously "repurposed" for spam. Not necessarily a showstopper (especially if you just plan to resell), but you should know what you're buying.

 

[jmcdougall17]

Thank you very much for your reply. I was denied my reconsideration, and after reading the article from your link, and a few other articles on the matter, I think the best course of action will probably be to start over on a new domain. Really sucks though, cuz I liked the domain name, old and had some great backlinks.

 

[enlytend]

Sorry to hear that (though not surprised ...)

If your site is similar in content and quality to the old site, you can try emailing the site owners and see if they will switch the (now dead) link to point to your site.