Revive an Old Site with a Spam Penalty?

[Dreo]

So I have an ecommerce site that got hit with a GWT link spam penalty ~4 years ago. From there, I took the site down and it's been dead ever since.

I am looking to bring the site back from the dead. I like the brand, it has age, a decent customer base, and it looks like the spam links are gone.

Is this doable and an okay idea with 4 years gone by? Would switching the WHOIS info to a new name/company help at all? I'd be rebuilding the site on a new platform, new product descriptions, names, etc...

Have any of you guys had success with something like this?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'd put up a homepage, nothing overkill, and then add it to a new Webmaster Tools account. If it still has a manual penalty you'll know there. If it has an algorithmic penalty it'll be hard to tell without trying to rank for some terms.

After 4 years the penalty may have expired. Google will release them and devalue the links after a LONG time, and I think 4 years would fall in that range. With all of the spam having slowly disappeared you may have scooted out of the penalty. If not, you can load all the trash into a disavow file and wait for the next Penguin refresh. If it's algorithmic you don't even get the choice of a reinclusion request, so it's just a waiting game.

If you have a ton of good links to the domain, I'd do the above and forget about it, and then check it on the Penguin refresh. If there's no saving factor (almost all spam) I'd start over on a non-penalized domain.