When you buy a domain or website, does that trigger a fresh look by Google?

[whodatyat]

I recently purchased a domain and the corresponding website.  For as far as I could tell, in the 12 months prior to my purchase, the site was well optimized within Google and had over 40 search terms on page 1 of Google in a really competitive space (lending-related).

When I made the purchase, the domain was transferred from seller's GoDaddy account and into my GoDaddy account and I placed privacy protection on the domain.  We did not move the hosting of the site--I took over his hosting account.  And I did not make any significant changes to the website.

About 1 week later, the site was totally removed from Google's index and I received notice in Google Webmaster Tools that the site may violate Google's quality guidelines. I filed reconsideration request telling Google that I was the new owner and that if there were any violations, they were caused by old owner.  One week later, I got note back from Google saying they had received my reconsideration request and if they think issues are cured, then they will reindex the site.  That was over a week ago and so seemingly they are not putting it back.

My question is this:  Does Google somehow automatically know when domains change hands and does this cause them to manually review sites?   The site in question was aggressively optimized but I don't understand what would have caused Google to take action on the site when they did.  In other words, if they were going to take action, why wouldn't they have done it in the prior 12 months or does the domain transfer put the site into some queue that makes them review it?

BTW, the site in question has a SEOMoz domain authority grade of 85 and still is showing up as PR 5

Thanks very much for your time and consideration

[ResslerMotors]

1. Run an "Open Site Explorer" check to see what links are pointing at you.  Start with the lower quality ones, and do a site:domain search.  If they aren't indexed, get rid of that link.
2. Check where your links are located on these sites.  Footer?  Request a new location, or request to delete the link.
3. Check your keyword density.  If it's obviously high, decrease it
4. Find straggler pages.  Judge it to see if its valuable.  If not, 301 it.
5. Check out all of your pages (starting with most important).  Do they have light content?  Write more good content

[Highland]

Google is a registrar and it is known that they use some information to assist in crawling the internet (i.e. if you create domain.com as a site with no links or any external information, Google will still find and crawl it). I haven't heard of them using registrar information against owners, however. I have several domains in private registration and none of them are negatively affected by that either.

If you were dropped from their index that means something really bad went down. The reinclusion notice is automatic. When an actual human reviews your site is anyone's guess.

Here's an article listing the most common reasons for a complete deindex ban. I would review your site and make sure you're not doing any of them. Without any other data I can't venture a guess as to what was done to trigger it.

http://www.bigoakinc.com/seo-articles/banned-by-google.php

[YannickVeys]

Google won't ban a site just because it got a new owner. Google kicks websites out of their index who violate their guidelines.

So my best guess is that the website already violated the guidelines. You should try to find out why google thinks the website violated the guidelines.

Other thing: filing for a reconsideration request is often done, but not often done with any effect.

The first thing you have to consider BEFORE doing the request: has this action by google been manual, or is this an action based on the algorithm. If you have a poor quality site, lots of low quality back links, 26 adsense blocks on the site (I know you can only have 3, but just to emphasize...) then you can almost be 100% sure that it wasn't a manual action, but an algorithm change that got you kicked out/devaluated.