Former 'parking' history seems to be hurting my site

[netfleet]

Hi Guys,

I hope you can help with this. I have a site that is 100% whitehat -content backlinks etc all pretty good.

However I registered the domain some time ago, parked it with one of the big parking companies for a few years and then thought this domain deserves more so I 'parked' it at another company (don't think I'm allowed to mention the name am I?) which rather than traditional domain parking helps create 'mini sites' very quickly.

I customised my mini site and added some unique content (although most of the content was duplicate through the parking co.) and a tiny bit of link building.

The site was happily indexed but didn't rank very well. Which was fair enough as most of the content was duplicate.

Then suddenly all my sites that were parked at this company were de-indexed. Bit tough I thought after all some of these sites did actually look pretty good and show value to visitors despite the dupe content.

Lots of customers at this parking company reported the same (although not everybody seemed to be affected)

Anyway not my battle to try and proce to Google that this wasn't fair so I did what I'd planned to do for a while and instead moved the domain away and created a nice little site with lots unique content etc

I then redoubled my SEO and built plenty of whitehat IBLs.

However it still didn't get indexed. I submitted a reinclusion request via WMT explained fully the situation including the fact that I'd parked it at this company and suspected that was the problem.

The reinclusion request was denied and has been twice more since (each time adding a little more content and tidying up errors just in case).

So I feel like I'm stuck. I've put a fair bit of effort into the site and am loathe to put more in if it's all for nothing. The domain is very valuable (it's an exact match of a huge generic search term) so I must build a site on this domain or not at all.

Is there anything I can do? Surely it should not be the case that past penalties will forever put a black mark against the domain? It's frustrating as I have heaps of very much inferior sites indexed and often ranking well - the only difference seems to be the domain's history.

I've also got one other site developed with the same problem albeit early days with the development and lack of indexing.

Thanks for any help!

David

[tedster]

Your analysis may be correct. It sounds like Google may have a problem with something in the past promotion for the domain. Parking alone wouldn't do it, but the second service you used does sounds suspect.

Not being inside Google, there's little I could say for sure. Almost no penalty is forever, but many of them simply stick around for a long, long time before they get released.

In the same situation, many have successfully moved their work to a new domain. But I understand that the domain itself is special, so you are reluctant to do that. Still, if it stays on this domain you may have a long wait. It may also magically appear in the near future. Strange things do go on. I know of one case where the company was specifically told the penalty would never be removed, and yet it was three months later.

[netmeg]

I'm pretty sure I know what company you're talking about, and I had a few domains there as well. They never recovered. It's been well over a year. I think you need to move to a new domain.

[1script]

I was able to "clean" a formerly parked domain name by filing a re-inclusion request. It was rather quick, too. Within a month or so it started behaving normally - normal G*bot visit rate, PR growth, # of indexed pages etc. I should mention though that I was not the one who parked it, the previous owner did and so I stressed in the request that I just bought it and I'm using it differently from the previous owner. Maybe ownership change has helped. If you feel like you've exhausted other options, maybe you can do some creative inter-registrar domain transfer (without contact details) and then file the re-inclusion?

[netfleet]

Thanks for your feedback guys.

Tedster, good to hear that time should heal eventually - maybe I should just be more patient. Do my time with good grace.

Netmeg - yes you know exactly the company I'm talking about - they were the leaders in their field of pseudo-development. It's a tough line by Google isn't it? It's not as if the company was acting black hat per se - they were just trying to deliver a solution between parking and individual site development. Google supposedly judge everything by 'user experience' and there's no way this company offered a lesser user experience than 'Adsense for Domains' for example.

I really wouldn't move the site to another domain. Without the domain, the effort to get it up and running and ranked would outweigh the potential return. The .com version of this domain sold for US$350K earlier this year to put it in perspective. I have the com.au so even undeveloped it should be worth $10K or so. But I really want to develop & rank it as it has tremendous search volume.

1script, that's a great idea but I wonder if I would dare? After filing 3 reinclusion requests fessing up my previous 'indiscretions' wouldn't a new owner's request shortly after raise some flags. If they thought I was 'cheating', I could be in serious trouble (Google jail?)

[incrediBILL]

I'm not sure if it's the same parking company, but one of them got outed for cloaking special "ads" to Google. If you were a visitor, you saw normal PPC ads on their domains. However, if you were Googlebot, they showed you a special batch of "ads" with direct links to domains they were promoting.

Probably would've gotten away with it too except one morning I wake up and they're in my #1 spot with over 5K backlinks all from domain parked pages to the site now above mine.

After seeing a domain park play that way I'd never use one to park a domain I wanted to ever use in the future, that's for sure.

[netmeg]

No, this wasn't them.

[mhansen]

I had several domains on one of the content-parking services as well. All were dropped from the G-index, or so seriously penalized, I never thought I could do much with them again.

Well, several of the .coms were valuable (at least to me) so I started building my own informational sites on them, just like you have done. Unique monthly content, authority backlinks, etc. Still declined reinclusion.

After 45-60 days of the last reinclusion request with no results, I decided to see if dropping an adsense box on them would help (I was grasping for short straws at this point) and found the problem... they were penalized by the adsense team for a TOS violation, and would not show ads. (Ad spaces were blank)

After heading to the adsense confessional, asking for... and being granted adsense forgiveness, I went back a few weeks later and requested reinclusion.

The sites have been reindexed and perform OK, but after 7 months have passed, I can tell there is still some type of domain penalty against them based on the search traffic comparison from other engines as compared to Google. (Bing vs. Yahoo vs Google amounts)

So.. I would suggest seeing if it will deliver ads from adsense also. If not, you may find that the penalty lies in another channel of Google, which spills over to the search quality team delivering a red x.

Timeline:

- Adsense forgiveness took 2 days from request date to grant date.
- Quality Reinclusion took 5 calendar days from request to grant date.

MH

[netfleet]

Thanks for the suggestion. Adsense is already running fine on it and always has so that's not the problem.

I think I'll wait a little while and then visit the reinclusion confessional again (nice term for it!) but this time with a little more contrition.

My first request I even dared to suggest that I felt the hard stance they dealt the parking company was a bit rough. Should learn to fight my own battles only I suppose.