Penalty recovery gone

[IanTheScot]

Back in August we got a manual penalty lifted by Google for spammy links that we never created. This had been affecting us for almost a year. For about six weeks our traffic bounced back up to pre-penalty levels - between 60 and 120% greater a day from Google search traffic.

Since then, our Google organic traffic has decayed to the point where yesterday we were back below our penalty level and we don't have a new penalty.

Can anyone give me some advice about what may have caused this? Link to our site.

[SEO5Team]

Hi Ian,

You might still be having bad links associated with your site, that's why you've gone down in traffic again. Check to see if the drop in traffic was associated with any of Google's updates here . Check your competitors and the keywords that they are outranking you for. Are they better optimized for those keywords?

[dmccarthy]

You can disavow links in GWT.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

A great tool for checking your traffic against google updates is panguin tool - it's a great resource for seeing your google traffic and any drops you may have had and how they're related to panda, penguin, and other algo updates.

Also, check in webmaster tools your latest links - see if more spammy links are coming in recently and if this correlates in any way with your drop - if so, disavow these links and do another reconsideration request.

Do you know if it was specific keywords that were bringing a lot of traffic that you've dropped for or it's more across the board? That will help in figuring out the problem.

Mark

[Valarlf]

It is strange that a page has bad links if not done SEO, I think you may be being affected by Negative Seo

watch?v=F5s992PZAus

[IanTheScot]

Thank you for the suggestions. It looks like we may have taken a hit from Panda 21 at the beginning of November but we were moving the site to a new server so the days right before the update don't have any analytics data.

The last couple of days saw a spike last year because Advent started this weekend instead of next weekend this year so that's why some of the numbers for this weekend look off.

Overall though, it looks like we hit a peak for most keywords in January and then saw a major decline in February when we received our manual penalty and even though the penalty has been officially revoked, we've never recovered fully.

Thanks for the panguin suggestion. We use chartelligence which actually overlays within GA on any chart which is very nice.

I guess I'll go back and manually disavow those bad links even though I've already submitted them and see what happens.