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I've had a site that I've had turned off for the last year or two, and I restored it from database and switched it back on recently.

I've placed it on the same domain where it was, on a new server with all the content it used to have.

It's a Q/A answer style site (similar to StackExchange) so it had a lot of content and a lot of internal pages.

The site used to get a significant amount of SEO traffic (about 80% of it's traffic used to come from organic), I'm wondering if Google is likely to put a red flag on my site since it may look strange that it's gone from being down to all of a sudden having ~3000 internal pages.

Am I likely to get black-listed? Is there anything I can do to ensure that I don't and to ensure that I'm not penalized (and that hopefully my Google rankings are restored in as short a time-frame as possible to what they previously were)?

Thanks in advance.

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I had a site for a community organization that was down for about six months due to hosting issues. When I brought it back up, it was almost like starting with a fresh website from an SEO perspective. It didn't rank as well as it had for the organization's name. Google wasn't sending much long tail traffic to it.

Once the site had been up for a few months, Google seemed to start trusting it again. It regained its old rankings.

The only things that I can think of for you to do to speed the process are:

  • Demonstrate that the site is now reliable by keeping it up
  • Show that the site is growing by getting new content flowing in again
  • Show that the site is popular again by asking for some inbound links (especially places that used to link to the site but which might have taken the links down while the site was down)
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If the links are to internal pages, then you should be good since it would just be considered a large site with a lot of content.

The question is if the inbound links you previously had still exist, and are considered authoritative & relevant to the content they link to. You could check the number of backlinks to get some idea of this.

I would suggest working with Google Webmaster Tools and submitting an updated sitemap to ensure all the links are crawled and indexed again.

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  • Yep. Agreed. Submitted the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, and it's now being cached. Although the rankings/traffic have a LONG way to go still.
    – James Spittal
    Jun 4, 2013 at 13:21
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I don't think you'll get "black-listed" (if you don't suffer from duplicate content). Your rankings will depend on whether your site develops like a legitimate site in the next 3-6-12 month regarding traffic and backlinks.

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