Can I buy a domain that used to have spam on it and still rank?
Why Webmasters Stack Exchange recommends it
Webmasters Stack Exchange answerers point people to it when asked whether a domain's bad past will hurt rankings, since it is a direct statement from Google's spam lead.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2013 to 2014.
What it is
A short Google Webmaster Help video in which Matt Cutts answers a viewer question about buying a secondary-market domain that has a spammy history. He explains manual versus algorithmic penalties, reconsideration requests, and warns against becoming the one left holding a domain a spammer burned out.
What people said
Recommends Stephen Ostermiller · 2013-05 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “How much can a particular domain be tainted from bad prior practices?”
Advice from Google's Matt Cutts answers the question "Can I buy a domain that used to have spam on it and still rank?": Don’t Be The Sucker That Buys The Spammy Domain [LINK] Matt explains that there can be two penalties here, one on the manual side and one on the algorithmic side. If this was a manual penalty, you can fix the spam and submit a reconsideration request. Manual spam also has a time out, where the penalty will auto-expire if the spam is cleaned up. If it was an algorithmic penalty, then you need to wait until the algorithm picks up on the changes. Plus, if the spam was very aggressive, it would be much harder to recover from that penalty without going through all the spam and c
Recommends I.G. Pascual · 2013-09 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “How to know if a domain is blacklisted by Google?”
Matt Cutts explains in this video [this video] that a site might be affected by previous bad practices, but only on extreme cases. You can still make a reconsideration request [LINK] so Google may treat your site as a new original site.
Cites Stephen Ostermiller · 2013-12 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “How can I find a list of backlinks by date for a domain?”
Matt Cutts recommends that you not try to use a domain with a spammy history [this video] : The way to think about it is there are a lot of spammers out there that do basically what's known as a churn and burn tactic, where they just use as many techniques to try to make domain rank as they can and then as soon as that domain is awful, or bad, or Google has caught it, then they sort of move on and they go on to some other exploit, and they try to tackle it with another domain. Now what you don't want to do is be the guy who gets caught left holding the bag. Who buys what looks like a good sounding domain, but actually a spammer has kind of driven into the ground. It's almost like instead of start
Cites RichardB · 2014-07 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “SEO history of recycled domain name”
Manual penalties are rare, and most will be algorithmically generated. This means that any penalties caused by on-site black-hat SEO should go when you upload a new site. I imagine the only real penalties you have to worry about are from bad backlinks. Check these, and if there are lots of spam links (directory / articles etc) pointing to your homepage, then there is a high chance that it will have some negative effect on your search position. Even if it doesn't have a penalty now, bad backlinks could well trigger a future penalty. Lots of sites were not hit when the Penguin update first came out, but then got a penalty when it was updated. If you bought the domain from a 'domain flipper', t