Everybody knows how time intensive it can be to build up a site, and then maintain it. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to do all that. With all that time and effort you put in to a website, all it takes is some bad SEO techniques to bring all that work down to depths where there is no hope of ever seeing light again for that site, especially when you’re hit with a manual penalty from Google.
There could be several reasons why you could get hit with a penalty. Perhaps some paid reviews were utilized on the site. Could it be that links were purchased? It could be that the site was placed in countless directories in order to get the word out. No matter what happened, a site that is hit with a penalty for one or more of these reasons could be subject to one final action. The site may very well have to be put to rest.
As hard as it may be, there are some circumstances where killing a site may simply be the easiest thing to do. Emotionally though, it’s not as easy, since you put so much effort into building it up. Even though there are damaged sites that have a chance of being salvaged and repaired, that isn’t always the case.
Eric Ward has written a post on Search Engine Land that goes into a little more detail about when you should kill a site, and when it may be better to try salvaging it. You can check out Eric’s post by following the link below.
Search Engine Land: When The Best Move Is To Kill The Site