When is a clean-slate approach justified?

Clean slate justification criteria:

Justified scenarios:

Permanent blocklist presence (refused removal)

Domain associated with serious abuse

Recovery attempts failed over months

Business pivot requiring rebrand anyway

Cost-benefit analysis:

Time and resources for recovery versus restart

Brand value of existing domain

Customer base awareness of domain

Not justified:

Impatience with recovery timeline

Avoiding root cause fixes

Hoping to escape without behavior change

If proceeding:

Fix the underlying problems first

Warm up new domain properly

Do not repeat mistakes

Clean slate without behavior change will fail again.

Starting over only makes sense if the old ship is truly unsalvageable and you will operate differently.