When is a clean-slate approach justified?
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.
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