Possible to recover from Thin/Duplicate content penalties?

[ccgale]

Hi all, first post here so sorry if in wrong section.

After a little advice, if I may, from more experienced SEOers than myself with regards to writing off domains or keeping them.

To cut a long story short I do a lot of affiliate marketing, back in the day (until the past 6 months or so) you could just take a merchant's datafeed and with some SEO outrank them for individual products. However, since the Google Panda update this hasn't worked as well and now it's much hard to do - which is better for the end user.

The issue I have is that I got lazy and tried to see if I could still get some datafeeds to rank with only duplicate content. The sites ranked very well at first but after a couple of weeks died massively. They went from 0 to 300 hits a day in a matter of 24 hours and back to 2 hits a day. The sites now not rank for anything which is obviously because they are duplicate content.

The question I have is are these domains dead, can they be saved? Not talking about duplicate content but as a domain itself. I used about 10 domains to test things, they ranged from DA 35 to DA 45 - one of the tests being can a domain with reasonable DA rank for duplicate content.

Seeing as the test didn't work I want to use the domains for proper sites with proper unique content, however so far although the new unique content is getting indexed it is suffering from the same ranking penalties the duplicate (and now deleted content) pages had.

Is it worth trying to use these domains, will Google finally remove the penalty when they notice that the bad content is no longer on the site or are the domains very much dead?

Many thanks

[ccgale]

thanks, that's along the lines of what I was thinking. Given the age and the score of the domains I would rather word to get them back again than start again with brand new domains.

[MarieHaynes]

I think it's worth a try.  If you were hit for duplicate and thin content you likely were hit with a Panda penalty.  Panda refreshes from time to time and if Google sees that the problem is no longer there then the penalty is lifted.

So, if you built a good quality domain on the same url, the next time there is a Panda refresh (which is usually within 1-2 months) you should be able to rank.