Negative SEO penalty, new domain?

[Karen_Dauncey]

One of my clients has just been hit with a Penguin 3.0 penalty. They have been subject to a negative link building attack for the last 5 months and despite my best effort it appears I haven't disavowed enough, someone was building a lot of links to them and all really low quality spam and a lot of forum profiles. They still rank for their brand, the site is in the index but the only rankings I can see are in Google Local.

My advice to them for the quickest way back into Google is to get a new domain and relaunch on this new domain. The challenge is, the domain they want to buy used to be used as a domain in the 'erotic video distrubution' industry. It currently has 17 backlinks from 9 domain and the anchor text is mostly brand related but I can see that 70 links have already been deleted.

I would consider this to be too high risk but would be interested to see if everyone agrees with me, it would be an awesome domain name if the history wasn't there!!

[MoosaHemani]

Here is what I would do if I will have the similar situation. Instead of saying good bye to the old domain just because someone is negatively attacking the website, I would try and get all of their links using tools like Ahrefs and Majestic SEO and disavow in Google disavow file and at the same time try to get highest quality link back to the website so that Google can have a clear idea of what is going on with the website.

Even in that case if the website hit the penalty or the penalty did not wave I probably will go for a new domain. In case of a new domain my advice will be to again create a link disavow file and include all links in the file and let Google know that you are buying this expired domain which have the following history but you are disavowing all the links so the history does not bite.

Obviously there is always a risk but I probably will take that risk if the domain name is that good.

Hope this helps!

[Dr-Pete]

It's tough to speak in generalities, but in almost all of the cases where I suspect negative SEO was in play, there was an inherent weakness or problems in the link profile to begin with. If you add those problems to a domain with a questionable history, your risk is going to be fairly high. If you were a new site in a completely different industry with no history (or a good history), then the history of that domain might not matter. In your case, though, I'm hearing some alarm bells.

Also keep in mind that unless you're going to start over cold-turkey, and not 301-redirect any of the old site, you'll carry any link-related problems with you. So, re-launching on a new domain is definitely a big decision and will probably take months of work to rebuild momentum. Granted, waiting for the next Penguin refresh could take months, too, so I understand your dilemma.

If you're going to take this step, though, I'd put the time and money into a domain with a clean history. You can't afford to do this twice.