Guilty website

[chainazo]

Hello everyone
I had a website for a few years that ranked very well (1st/3rd most of time). Then in a "definitive way for the 1st place" i downloaded several cracked plugins to improve positions. ERROR!. Google finally deindexes my website.
Then I forget the website for a few years, and now i want to re-rank it by starting from scratch and correcting it (new design and no bad plugins).
My question is whether google will again take my site seriously for good rankins or is it already a "stained" url and google will index it but not rank highly because it was "guilty".

Would it be a good idea to start from scratch with a new url? (that would be a shame because this url is very good).
Have you had a similar situation? How did you solve it?

Thanks in advance for your help

[Juniya]

To save yourself the headache? Just start fresh with a new domain...This was you don't have to have anxiety or stress worrying if you will wake up with your links gone after they had appeared to be stable in the rankings for days, weeks or even months.

Of course I assume you do now Google and other search engines are much harder to rank for than previously so it's not going to be easy no matter which method you choose.

[RedBar]

It's extremely difficult to get any site to rank well these days however I have had positive success with widget exact match domain names and if I were able to obtain more of these, even though they had poor sites on them, I would buy those names and especially so country-specific names.

If it doesn't do any good you can always move it to a new name but do give it time, 6 months would be good.

[tangor]

It's like flipping a coin---sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Quite a few have indicated a successful revival of old deprecated sites. Nearly as many have said the opposite.

You won't know until you try.

[Kendo]

I'll never forget seeing a website which had nothing on the page except the title in the head tags (an otherwise blank page) be listed as #1 in Google search results for my keywords. It had only been registered a couple of days beforehand.

So how can anyone believe that SEO is anything more than a cult myth?

[tangor]

So how can anyone believe that SEO is anything more than a cult myth?

Myths are hard to debunk. :)

Meanwhile, SEO has been nickle and dimed on both sides of the equation to the point that I don't believe either party (us v them) know what the heck is going on any longer.

Each tweak produces a new freak---and the waters become muddy.

[Kendo]

and the waters become muddy

Been muddied since day one. Their excuse for not disclosing their algorithm has always been about preventing it from being exploited. Only it's that algorithm that has been exploiting everyone.

Between manipulating search engine results for self interest and monitoring the web for possible winners to create competing startups, to monitoring everyone's email for insider tips, they have it sewn up.

If anyone in the SEO industry actually knew what worked best they would have one hell of a profitable website. But instead we have 1,000's of SEO scammers spamming us to death about "metrics" that come down to fabricated BS.

Every day is April Fools day.

[tangor]

If anyone in the SEO industry actually knew what worked best they would have one hell of a profitable website.

And you can bet they would NEVER share those secrets with ANYONE!

[chainazo]

Thanks everyone for your answers, they've been enlightening. I'll finally start a website with another new URL from scratch.