I have a question if my site was penalized by google. Is the penalty related to the domain or the site itself? If I wanted to start all over would I have to get a new domain or just rebuild the web site? Any help would be appreciated thanks
Most likely a completely new domain. There was a tutorial by someone on how to get out of the penalty, but from what I've read it's tough as nails to do and you risk getting the site banned again if you use the same website data.
Clean up your site's content. I had a friend who was penalized after he was ranking for some fairly high competition keywords. After he was penalized, he cleaned up his content, re wrote some of it and his rankings came back. They were gone for around 8-9 months.
Site get's the penalty. If you want to reuse the domain you'll have to start from scratch unless you got a lot of time.
Good question. What happens when the content the "spam backlinks" are pointing to is gone? I've read a lot of people talking about "backlink deletion". What if you just kill the page the backlinks are pointing to?