When it became apparent that the eventual Penguin 3.0 update was going to be a long time coming – more than a year went by before it finally updated – many people were thinking that they should have just started a brand new site rather than cleaning up and waiting for an eventual update.  And now that we have seen Penguin 3.0, people are obviously trying to decide which approach to take – clean up the issues or start over on a new domain incase the next Penguin is a year or more away.

This very question was presented to John Mueller in Google’s Webmaster Office Hours on Friday, and he gave his recommended approach to the situation.

In the wake of Google’s current algorithms, is it worth trying to recover a website from Penguin and Panda.  If the business doesn’t care about the domain at all, would it likely be faster to start again with a new domain, new site, new domain and a viral content strategy?

It is really not surprising that webmasters are pondering whether they should just cut their losses and start over again.  Here is Google’s John Mueller’s response to the question.

I think this is something that you always have to keep in your mind in some cases it might make sense to start over with a new website, especially if the business has just recently started on a domain, it’s probably easier to make that decision.  If you have been working on the same website for years, and you run across a situation that you can’t solve, or can’t solve in a reasonable amount of time, then maybe moving to a new domain makes a whole lot of sense.

I would try to avoid that as much as possible, because I know that if you have been working on one domain for a really long time, the its a lot of work to start over with a new domain, its not something that you can just copy and paste the code and then everything works as it did before.  So i think this is always a tough decision, and sometimes it makes sense, sometimes its a little bit of an easier decision but it’s never something I’d say there’s a general answer for this that everyone should follow – so if your site has low quality content then you should always move to a new domain because if you have low quality content and you move it to a new domain, that doesn’t really solve the basic problem.

But it’s always a tricky one.

While webmasters will obviously need to decide what is the best choice for them, it sounds as though if it is on a domain name you aren’t particularly attached to, that it might just be easier to theoretically torch it and start over with the same content – provided the penalty isn’t related to thin content – on a new domain.

If the site is doing well socially, it is pretty easy to move the social media related accounts to point to the new domain to start over, and pick up marketing where you left off on the previous domain.