Question on starting again after being penalised for bad links

[em_welsby]

Hi, in a scenario where you have been heavily penalised for bad links but the quality of your site is good, If you put the exact same version of your penalised site on a new domain (with no redirects), would Google recognise it and penalise it again, or would that give it a completely fresh start?

Any advice or experience with this would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[RyanKent]

** If you put the exact same version of your penalised site on a new domain (with no redirects), would Google recognise it and penalise it again, or would that give it a completely fresh start?**

That would be a fresh start.

The preferred method of resolving the manipulative link issue is to run a campaign and remove the bad links. Such a campaign is time consuming and costly, but yields the best results.

If you cannot afford such a campaign, you can run away from the problem by changing domains in the manner you described. If you do such, it would be best if you can try to identify your good links and work with the publishing site to update the link to the new site.

[irvingw]

That should only be done as a last resort if your site is completely nuked. Or unless it was a relatively new site to begin with and all the links are bad anyway and there is nothing good pointing to you.

If your site is well established, good PR and some good links and time put into it, I would work on removing the bad links and going through the reconsideration process.

[Marcus_Miller]

I would second this, it is a very last ditch approach but in a worst case scenario, what else can you do?

Has anyone actually done this? Any other considerations? Would you think it would be worth noindexing the original site first to get it out of the index before launching on a new domain?

I am actually working with a few companies and upon reviewing the link profile, it is like 99% junk so in this instance, starting again with some outreach to the few good links is certainly a more attractive prospect but I would be interested to hear any feedback from folks that have done this.