It is often believed by some SEOs that websites that have been previously penalized by Google, whether an algorithmic penalty or manual action spam penalty, that they would be scrutinized or algorithmically challenged more than another website that has never had any previous penalty – particularly those websites that had been penalized for a long time.  And sometimes it is easier just to rebuild from scratch rather than fix all the issues with a website.  But what about a site that may have a shady past, do algorithms look at those sites a bit harder?

In the Google Webmaster Central office hours today, John Mueller stated that just because the website has been previously penalized doesn’t mean that it has to work that much harder compared to another website when new algorithms hit. Google looks at the current state of the website when Googlebot crawls it and the algorithms are applied.

The question was brought up in regards to whether it is worth rebuilding an older site that may have been hit by panda or penguin previously, and whether it is better to rebuild on the new URL or rebuild the old one.

In general are algorithms are looking at the current state of a website. And of course that kind of involves things like crawling and indexing because when we say the current state that means the current state as we know about it which means we had to crawl it and index it and process all the signals first and at that point we are looking at the current state. But it’s not the case that we’d say well the previous algorithm looked at your site year ago and thought it was bad so you would have to do even more work than another website to kind of get out of that. Essentially it’s a look at the current state and say this is fine than that’s a good sign.

The question was then followed up with another asking specifically about a site that has been hit with a longer term panda or penguin penalty and whether the same would apply or if rebuilding would be the better option.

I wouldn’t worry about it from the point of view. If you are considering revamping your website and making a significantly better than that’s not something where I’d say you need to move to a different URL to cut a profit from that. I think users are can respect that if you make your quality changes like that and the search engines will pick up on that as well as the three processes the data so from that point of view I wouldn’t artificially hold us back but rather think about what you can do to improve the site overall and actually go ahead and do that.

So despite somewhat popular opinion, a previously penalized website doesn’t mean it has the touch of death in regards to SEO.

Here is the link to the video.