I bought a domain name a couple of weeks ago that was a drop/expired domain. I got it for registration fee (the regular cost to register the domain) and it is a good, dictionary word domain.
I did my normal research on the domain before I bought it and everything looked good except that it had nothing in the Google index. It was parked (basically just an advertising site) for the previous 6-9 months so I wasn’t sure if that was why it wasn’t indexed.
Since it was a good dictionary word that was great for the purpose I wanted it for I went ahead and took a chance since it only cost registration fee. I didn’t have much to lose, other than a few bucks.
I had plans to develop the domain into a website so I installed WordPress and went ahead and slapped up a contact and a couple of other pages just for temporary use.
I then went and added it to my Google Search Console account and got it verified. I submitted the pages and by the next day nothing had showed up in Google yet. Usually the pages that get submitted to Google get indexed quickly but after almost a day, nothing.
I then went to my Google webmasters account and found that the domain had a manual action (Google Penalty/Removed from their index) for previous spam. I had never had a domain that had a manual action so this was new territory for me.
I went and did my research on the subject and found that it is usually hard to get the penalty lifted by Google. So, after learning what I needed to know I set forth to get this penalty lifted so that I can build the website that I had planned on with the domain.
After spending a day or so putting a lot of effort into it I built a 5 page starter site and then submitted a reconsideration request to Google to try to have the manual action (Penalty) lifted.
My fingers were crossed as I had high hopes for what I had planned for the domain/website.
After about a week of checking Google webmasters tools I had saw the penalty was no longer there. I then went and submitted my websites pages to Google and after about 5-10 minutes, they were there!
My new websites pages were in the Google index, which for those who don’t know is basically the lifeblood of a website.
Now that the weight of that penalty was lifted from my shoulders I am free to continue to build up my new project and see what I can make of it. What a big relief, because it’s not easy to get a Google penalty lifted from a domain name. I did it in my first try by creating a good effort site that wasn’t a spam site which is what Google hates!
Just a note to those who don’t know what exactly a Google manual action penalty is for a domain. Basically it means that if a domain has a manual action penalty (it was put there by a person) it will never show up in any Google search results.
That means that the only real way that people will go to your site is if they type the websites address into their web browsers address bar. If you have any links on other websites to your website then people can get to your site that way as well.
Basically you need to be in the Google index so if people search for something that is relevant to your website, it will show up in their results somewhere.
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