How long to recover from manual spam penalty?

[IanTheScot]

If anyone doesn't think that spam sabotage is possible, here is proof. In February we received a suspicious spammy link notice and penalty from Google. We did several things to try and fix the problem including getting old links from not very relevant sites removed and submitted, and were denied, reconsideration twice. On the advice of Billy here on the forum, we went through the bottom end of our inbound links through OSE and found about forty domains that had linked to us and were purely trash sites full of link spam. We filed another reconsideration request listing every one of these sites along with dates we tried to contact the site owner (almost always impossible) to delete links to our site and two weeks later we received a note back that the manual penalty had been lifted.

My question now is, from your experience, how long does it take to notice a recovery from this penalty?

This experience also has me concerned that site sabotage is actually pretty simple when you can plant garbage links from 40 sites, many of which are the same with different urls, and get someone penalized on Google.

[Klarke]

I've had two different sites recover from manual spam actions.  The first one regained all of it search positions (and even ranks better now) within one week after receiving the "manual spam action - revoked" message.

The second one received the same message, but hasn't been able to regain its rankings.

The difference between them is that first had really good links and some bad ones that Google probably wasn't even counting in the first.  So when the penalty was revoked, the rankings returned as they were before.

The second though had alot of bad links.  Many of those were helping it rank, so when they were removed ...the rankings went with them.   But it was clear that the penalty was lifted at about 10 days after receiving the revoked message.

[RyanKent]

I agree with Klarke's assessment.

Some sites recover almost fully due to their rankings not being propped up by the negative links. Other sites are no where close to where they were before the penalty. All of the penalty removals I have worked with have had their rankings improve after the penalty was removed, but the amount of recovery varies widely.

[IanTheScot]

Fortunately, these bad links represented a very small number of the links to our site so we will hopefully see a strong rebound in the next few days.

[Sangeeta]

Hi Klarke,

What was the time gap between submitting the reconsideration request to Google and the "manual spam action - revoked" message received from Google.

[IanTheScot]

So two days ago the majority of our rankings took a jump up with a few falling slightly. Our organic Google traffic has been up over 65% since then. We have a long way to go before we are back where we were in January and hopefully this adjustment is the first of a good trend.

So in our case the answer to my initial question is that it took ten days to see the first improvements. Hopefully these aren't the last.

[Klarke]

For the first site, it took 2 weeks and was successful on the first try.  I know exactly which links were suspect and detailed the removal of the ones under my control and my requests for removal of the others (only about 50% of which were deleted).  I think they considered that I reformed my spamming ways, and so lifted the penalty.

The second site took three separate RRs over a period of about 2 months, each time more links were removed to satisfy them.   The site went from 600 root linking domains to about 150.