25% of expired domains came with a Google manual penalty
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25% of expired domains purchased came with a Google manual penalty, even when Moz spam score was 0 . Read the whole case study here: http://www.authoritywriters.com/2017/10/google-manual-penalty-on-expired-domains.html
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The penalty mentioned in the article wasn't even a link based penalty...
The Moz spam score looks at the quality of links pointing to a domain and has nothing to do with spam content on pages - so that score is irrelevant here.
Having the penalty removed could have been as easy as clicking the 'Request a review' button so Google would check to see that the domain no longer contains any auto-generated spam.
I would also have to ask why the person even wanted these domains? They are clearly up to some black hat SEO tactics and should probably stop complaining about Google penalties...
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Not really a question but still interesting. I think it's not weird for Google to at least check expired domains as a lot of them are bought for the sole purpose of spammy linkbuilding.
Apart from Google, from an organic point of view it seems like a natural process to me that expired domains lose value from their links. For example, a niche blog writes articles about technical car issues for a specific brand and model. There's valueable information on that page and therefore other web sites refer to (link to) these articles. If the website owner discontinues the blog and the articles are removed, the links to these articles won't have any value anymore. So why would they count towards DA, PA, TF and such metrics?
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