How long to wait before starting again when Google won't include your homepage in results

[johanisk]

This post is deleted!

[anthonydnelson]

I think you need to weigh the efforts needed to rank a new site vs the efforts needed to recoup your current site's ranking.

For the search query "Loch Lomond Lodges" I see some pages ranking on the first page with 15 & 20 total linking root domains. Since this is the case, I would give starting fresh serious consideration and make sure you keep a clean link profile this time.

[johanisk]

Thanks Anthony - that's sound advice.

We also own the .com domain.  Could we use that and start again or is it likely to wrongly fall foul of the algo, in that Google will assume it's the same domain.  The content would be largely the same.

[anthonydnelson]

I think using the .com would be fine. I would avoid 301 redirecting the penalized site to the clean domain.