• Practical eCommerce, Tuesday, July 29, 2008 1 PM

Brendan Gibbons recounts the tale of Chris Stump, a hammock retailer and owner of Onlyhammocks.com, who purchased said domain and has been dealing with the penalties of its previous owner ever since.

Stump bought the domain in October 2007, and got started with a solid paid and organic search marketing plan. But it became clear that something was wrong after Onlyhammocks.com was left with low PageRank and only a few pages indexed after a number of months.

Stump checked with the Wayback machine at Archive.org, and found that the site had been owned by spammers for the previous two years. As such, it had incurred heavy penalties from the three major engines, and trying to get those penalties removed has proven to be a challenge.

While Stump has been able to get indexed by Yahoo (after getting in touch with a live representative), he's had little luck with the reentry process for Google and MSN. While he can try to drive additional traffic via PPC, the Onlyhammocks.com site is stuck in poorly indexed limbo while the two engines complete their review process.

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