Not ranking for brand name searches on Google, but am on all other search engines. Blacklisted?

The domain used to be in the conspiracy niche from 2001-2016 and was bought and pivoted to a consumer-friendly brand/niche around then. Searching for the exact brand name, which is also the domain name, in Google doesn't list us in the top 100. But Yandex, Duckduckgo, Yahoo, Bing, etc, all rank us 5 or 6 on page 1.

Google Search Console shows no security or manual actions. Nothing shows an unsafe site. The actual site now is minimal (6 pages).

Any ideas about what could cause or how to at least start climbing the ranks again for our branded searches?

krashx6 said:

The domain used to be in the conspiracy niche from 2001-2016 and was bought and pivoted to a consumer-friendly brand/niche around then. Searching for the exact brand name, which is also the domain name, in Google doesn't list us in the top 100. But Yandex, Duckduckgo, Yahoo, Bing, etc, all rank us 5 or 6 on page 1.

Google Search Console shows no security or manual actions. Nothing shows an unsafe site. The actual site now is minimal (6 pages).

Any ideas about what could cause or how to at least start climbing the ranks again for our branded searches?

Click to expand...

Appears like you bought an expired domain, did you restore the content of the previous site and try to get google to index the site first before you start building your own content on it?

If you didn't do that, you would have a hard time ranking. Google doesn't depend on other search engines, it's rather those engines that occasionally depend on Google, so it doesn't matter whether your site ranks there or not, unless they are your target audience.

HenryObi said:

Appears like you bought an expired domain, did you restore the content of the previous site and try to get google to index the site first before you start building your own content on it?

If you didn't do that, you would have a hard time ranking. Google doesn't depend on other search engines, it's rather those engines that occasionally depend on Google, so it doesn't matter whether your site ranks there or not, unless they are your target audience.

Click to expand...

No content restore. The domain was bought, but not the previous content. So all we got was a domain. The previous site was conspiracy niche, so we didn't want anything to do with it at all now. The new niche is closer to eco-friendly stuff.

We have just a few pages on the site "About, Mission, Contact, etc"

Any suggestions we should take now?

I think what may have happened is the conspiracy site posted a lot of "badspeak" and that made the domain blacklisted. I think you should ditch the domain and go for a new one.

ScribScribScrib said:

I think what may have happened is the conspiracy site posted a lot of "badspeak" and that made the domain blacklisted. I think you should ditch the domain and go for a new one.

Click to expand...

Im not finding anything online about "badspeak" domain, but I think I understand what you mean.

15 years of backlinks about conspiracies headed to the domain and now we're trying to convince Google that it's not a conspiracy site?

krashx6 said:

No content restore. The domain was bought, but not the previous content. So all we got was a domain. The previous site was conspiracy niche, so we didn't want anything to do with it at all now. The new niche is closer to eco-friendly stuff.

We have just a few pages on the site "About, Mission, Contact, etc"

Any suggestions we should take now?

Click to expand...

Follow the instructions on the below thread.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/guide-how-to-use-expired-domains-effectively.1223248/

krashx6 said:

Google Search Console shows no security or manual actions. Nothing shows an unsafe site

Click to expand...

If your domain is shadowbanned or fully banned, Google will never show it in GSC or email you about it.
It will just never rank for brand-name or any other keywords. that's the simple hint.
Also, another hint is google will crawl your pages, but will not index it, or if it indexes some of them, they'll never rank even for long tail keyword. But if you put quotation marks "keyoword sentence" like this, then you can see your page may be indexed.

these all signs are of google banning or ignoring your domian.

You can delete the domain from your domain registrar account, and re-register it from another registrar and keep on other nameservers, and IP address (host). This way google receives a signal that the domain has new owner, and it may start ranking it!

@krashx6 I am going to answer here and not reply to your PM incase others have similar questions.

There could be a few reasons as to why you are not ranking for your brand name.

1. You literally have no content apart from a basic pages so why would Google rank you?
2. The brand name might have a fair amount of competition and everyone else is more powerful.
3. Your domain is blacklisted.

The only way to test point 3 is to build some content and see if Google ranks it, same goes for point 1 and 2 actually. Obviously extreme longtail so very little effort required. If you rank, it is likely that you just need to keep building content and links and eventually Google will rank the brand. If you look at what currently ranks for the brand name you can determine the effort and cost required to beat them.

HTH
FT

I have an strategy for this
Create backlinks by divide your domain into 3 parts
Part 1: https://xyz.com
Part 2: xyz.com
Part 3: xyz

Use these as anchor text like a keyword
Make sure create ******** and only 3-5 backlinks every days (Total 50-100 ******** backlinks)
You will see under top 10 within 45 days
Best of luck