The wrath of Google's Hummingbird, a big problem, but no quick solution?

[Mouneeb]

One of our websites has been wrongfully tagged for penalty and has literally disappeared from Google. After lot's of research, it seems the reason was due to a ton of spammy backlinks and irrelevant anchor text. I have disavowed the links, but the results are still not rebounding back. Any idea how long the wrath of Google gods will last?

[Anti-Alex]

Since you lost those backlinks, you probably won't be able to bounce back to exactly where the site left off before those penalties. Did you get a manual action or was it done by the crawlers? Also, did you get a partial or full site penalty?

First double check your Google Webmaster Tools and see what the status of the penalty is and make sure that's removed. There's a Manual Actions area they added in the last few months which lets you see the stats and details of actions taken against your site by Google. If everything is resolved there, start improving your content and get back to link building. Since a good number of your old links are gone, they'll need to be replaced with better quality links.

[FedeEinhorn]

Everything that Alex said PLUS fill a reconsideration request. Wait a couple of weeks for Google's response. Your request MUST explain all the steps you made to clean up your site and be in compliance with Google's TOS (with proof and all)!

[artdivision]

Reconsideration request applies on manual spam penalties and not algorithmic updates. this has been covered extensively by Matt Cutts in numerous videos.

We dont know if he is manually penalised or not. in the case you are follow advises from the two gentlemen above.

IF you arent and removed all spammy links it will take a while for you to get your rankings back. Some people say you have to wait a big update but I would say give it a month and in the meantime try to main traffic from other channels ie. social media, email marketing etc.

[Mouneeb]

Yiannis,

Good point. Actually it seems that since the Hummingbird update, the rankings have disappeared. So I am going through all the SEO checkpoints and it seemed that spam backlinks was the viable reason for the site suffering in rankings. There is no notice that the site has been penalized so it appears to be due to the automatic due to the algorithm update. It has been 2 months since clearing the issues, but still no luck in rebounding on the rankings

[evolvingSEO]

Just checking in here. How have things been going? Just wanted to add some info;

• did you actually receive a "manual action" from Google? If not, a reconsideration request is not needed, it's an algo not a manual penalty
• Hummingbird will not do this. The "date" of Hummingbird is not really a specific point in time, and it's definitely not the day Google announced it. The Hummingbird algo didn't act like Panda, Penguin or any other penalty.
• Disavowing links can take up to six months to have an effect. This info is straight from John Muller at Google. Google has to actually crawl the websites that are listed in the disavow file before applying the disavow.
• It's not good enough to only disavow. Google wants to see some effort to remove links as well.
• You may not bounce back unfortunately (tough to say without seeing the site). But if you were artificially ranking too high with bad links, now you might be ranking where you should have all along.

Overall the best thing to do is remove and disavow as much as possible and work on moving forward as best possible to acquire new links and make the site better overall.