Does Google forgive past bad behaviour? Should they?

[austtr]

The link spam poster boy in my niche got away with blatant abuse for years. He dominated the rankings of big money search terms by creating a flagship site, surrounded it with a whole bunch of smaller satellite sites and then interlinked like a man possessed. Worked like treat for years.

Well, Google finally caught up with him and he copped a -50 a few months ago. No problem, he just moved to a new domain, created folders instead of satellite sites, moved all the original content across verbatim and redirected the old sites to the new one. Viola... the new site debuted at #5 of a 20m search term. Don't good rankings require Trust Rank, and how can a new site that gets its links by way of redirects from a penalized link farm possibly have earned any Trust Rank?

I have difficulty understanding Google's apparent willingness to allow back operators with the clear intent of gaming Google's search results at every opportunity.

What is your opinion... should long term offenders be given the boot? Should past history count against them?

[koan]

There was a time when age of a site counted a lot and it helped for things like that, but not so much it seems since Panda.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I know of one site who's owner had 3 different but similar sites (think 3 models of the same product) and was getting tired of maintaining them. He used 301 redirects from 2 sites to the remaining site and saw traffic jump by a factor of two. Of course he then got encouraged that he was seeing twice as many visitors and he removed the redirects and worked on all three sites again.

The traffic never dropped off to the main site nor were the other two ignored. It's like Google forgot to stop crediting the main site with the 301's.

[Zivush]

I had somewhat similar story but in a different angel and different Google behavior.
Once I bought a domain name that was used 2 year before and abandoned. I didn't know that.
The old site was a scrapper site - Participated in many link scheme, its content wasn't original (copied) and it has probably been penalized before the owner deleted.
When I've started establishing the site it took me 1-2 month to realize that the domain is not so new.
I decided to make 301 redirection of the old site URL's to my new sites' URLs based on relevancy. Might be a mistake?

At first, Google treated the site as good one, and traffic started to increase t0 300 visit per day.
Then, one day it was penalized, I asked for reconsideration explaining the old/new domain issue and the penalty removed.
Since then, the site was on a normal status but then and on the Panda 2 update it got hit and was pandalized..