Help me rank my recently depenalized site!

I bought a domain name and started building a site. Soon after, I discovered it was penalized. I got the manual penalty removed, but my site isn't ranking for any keywords!

I'm guessing all the old backlinks to the domain are worthless, right? Moz says my site has a domain authority of 15 and a page authority of 26. I should be ranking for something, right!

Should I disavow all the links? Google removed the penalty even though I didn't disavow anything. Is my site worthless? Should I start over with a new domain? My site is only about a month old, btw.

I want to start building links to my site, but I want to be sure that's it's actually worth it before I start.

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.

What are you using the website for? If it's a legit website for your business then yes you can use it. 1 penalty isn't too much to worry about if you're a legit website. It will hurt your rankings for a bit but you'll recover. I've seen this across 12+ domains in the law niche that were penalized and recovered 1-3 months later.

If it's a PBN site - kill it. Burn it. Bury it. You need to keep your network as clean as possible. If it's a network for tier 2 links then maybe keep it but I like to play my cards safe.

If it's not a PBN then disavow it. That tells Google that you don't want to associate from those links. If it's a PBN then do nothing with Google.

It's not a PBN, it's an Amazon/Adsense blog that's I just started building up. I'll go ahead and disavow the links. It does make sense that it could help.

And waiting 1-3 months to recover doesn't seem to bad either. Another site I'm building took a little over a month to start ranking and that was a clean domain.