Dealing with a penalized Domain Name

I am convinced their is an issue with the domain.

[Harwich]

I have a site that absolutely will not gain any PR or even show backlinks. This site has been live since January of 03. Yes, the site does show in the serps but very poorly. I have 2 other sites that are just development/test sites at this time. I got a pr4 link from a friend to all 3 of my sites. The two test sites went to a pr3 but the other site never moved off PR0 despite haveing other links to it from pr6 down. I know this domain was registered at one point before I got it but I don't think there was ever a site launched. I have seen some referrence to an expired domain penalty but have not been able to find much information on it. Here is what I am thinking about doing and would like ideas, suggestions etc.

1. Contact Google (not holding much hope there)

2. Register another domain. The thing I am unsure of is how to handle the redirect etc to try to get something for the links I have to the original site. This is virtual hosted on a win 2K machine so I will be limited on my options here. I would greatly appreciate any advice people can offer.

Thank You
Steve

[Harwich]

I am just wondering if my best bet would be to copy it all to a new domain and block the old site from the spiders and just start all over. I am concerned if I try a redirect to try to get pr from my current links that I will just get transfer the penalty instead. I would REALLY appreciate any thought and suggestions.

Thanks

[BlueSky]

Why don't you try sending an email to [e-mail] with the subject line "reinclusion request." You can ask whether your new domain carries a penalty and if they will drop it. Others have said here Google does write back.

[bcolflesh]

Did you try the Wayback machine at:

archive.org/

for the domain in question?

[Harwich]

Bluesky,

Thank You for your response. I have sent them a message and received a response that it was being forwarded to the engineers. I am hoping to hear more from them but am leary of waiting because from what I have read them actually replying seems to be a hit and miss proposition.

Bcolflesh,

Thank You for your response. I have done that and no site other than mine shows on it. However I know it was registered because we considered starting this site about six months before we actually did it. When we first considered it the domain name was not available, when we actually got ready to do it and checked for names again it was available. I figured someone registered it and then never did anything with it. I never considered that it could cause any problems.

Thanks

[cabbie]

I'll take bets that its an expired domain penalty.There doesn't have to be a site up previously to get a penalty.Its great though that google have answered you so keep us informed of their response.It will give many of us hope.

[raidersfan]

I am just wondering if my best bet would be to copy it all to a new domain and block the old site from the spiders and just start all over. I am concerned if I try a redirect to try to get pr from my current links that I will just get transfer the penalty instead. I would REALLY appreciate any thought and suggestions.

This would probably be the fastest solution.

[2_much]

Starting over will give you a fresh start, make sure you exclude googlebot otherwise you might get caught in the dupe filter.

[espeed]

I am experiencing the same problem. A client registered a domain that someone else had been using but let expire.

We took the site live in May 2003, and it is still has a PR0 except for one page (/about/) which is PR4. Until now, I never considered that the PR0 could be from an expired domain penalty, but if that's the case, how could that single page have a PR4?

On October 8, I sent e-mail explaining the problem to [e-mail], and someone replied:

Thank you for your note. We understand your concern and have passed your message on to our engineering team for further investigation.

We appreciate your patience.

Regards,
The Google Team

I tried following up with them today (Oct 15), and received the following response:

Thank you for your reply. As we previously indicated, we have passed the information to our engineers for investigation. Because our index contains over 3 billion pages, it may take us some time to investigate all of the reports we receive. We appreciate your patience during this process.

Regards,
The Google Team

[Ankheg]

I had the very same problem. I emailed Google, got the same response as above... and had a PR4 site about six weeks later. :)

These things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day; neither are good SERPs.