Google admits it can take up to a year to refresh/recover your site after it is revoked from Penguin!

[gazzerman1]

I found myself in an impossible situation where I was getting information from various people that seem to be "know it all's" but everything in my heart was telling me they were wrong when it came to the issues my site was having.

I have been on a few Google Webmaster Hangouts and found many answers to questions I thought had caused my Penguin Penalty. After taking much of the advice, I submitted my Reconsideration Request for the 9th time (might have been more) and finally got the "revoke" I was waiting for on the 28th of MAY.

What was frustrating was on May 22nd there was a Penguin refresh. This as far as I knew was what was needed to get your site back up in the organic SERPS.

My Disavow had been submitted in February and only had a handful of links missing between this time and the time we received the revoke. We patiently waited for the next penguin refresh with the surety that we were heading in the right direction by John Mueller from Google (btw.. John is a great guy and really tries to help where he can). The next update came on October 4th and our rankings actually got worse! I spoke with John and he was a little surprised but did not go into any detail.

At this point you have to start to wonder WHAT exactly is wrong with the website. Is this where I should rank? Is there a much deeper Panda issue. We were on the verge of removing almost all content from the site or even changing domains despite the fact that it was our brand name.

I then created a tool that checked the dates of every last cached date of each link we had in our disavow file. The thought process was that Google had not re-crawled all the links and so they were not factored into the last refresh. This proved to be incorrect,all the links had been re-cached August and September. Nothing earlier than that,which would indicate a problem that they had not been cached in time.

i spoke to many so called experts who all said the issue was that we had very few good links left,content issues etc.. Blah Blah Blah, heard it all before and been in this game since the late 90's, the site could not rank this badly unless there was an actual penalty as spam site ranked above us for most of our keywords.

So just as we were about to demolish the site I asked John Mueller one more time if he could take a look at the site, this time he actually took the time to investigate,which was very kind of him. he came back to me in a Google Hangout in late December, what he said to me was both disturbing and a relief at the same time. the site STILL had a penguin penalty despite the disavow file being submitted in February over 10 months ago! And the revoke in May.

I wrote this to give everyone here that has an authoritative site or just an old one, hope that not all is lots just yet if you are still waiting to recover in Google. My site is 10 years old and is one of the leaders in its industry. Sites that are only a few years old and have had unnatural link building penalties have recovered much faster in this industry which I find ridiculous as most of the time the older authoritative sites are the big trustworthy brands. This explains why Google SERPS have been so poor for the last year. The big sites take much longer to recover from penalties letting the smaller lest trustworthy sites prevail.

I hope to see my site recover in the next Penguin refresh with the comfort of knowing that my site currently is still being held back by the Google Penguin Penalty refresh situation.

Please feel free to comment below on anything you think is relevant.

[Asjad]

Since Penguin 1 (April, 2012), I was closely observing and working for many websites to recover. Being honest, with all efforts, I have never seen a website that has fully recovered. Maximum recover is up to 50%. If anyone have better example, I love to see it.

I realized the fact in early 2013, if i work even 50% on new site as compared to recovery, I can rank better than my original website. So, I changed my policy. I started similar domains and ranked them. I promoted by original website through PPC & Social Media. And I am pretty much successful with my plan.

I feel for you and wish for your recovery soon. I agree with you at most of points.

Regards

[MarieHaynes]

I have a theory that the cache date on a page does not always represent the date that all of the links on the page were crawled.  Google has said repeatedly that it can sometimes take 6 months to a year for the disavow file to fully take effect.  In other words, if you have disavowed a particular link, it could take a year for Google to revisit that link and apply the invisible nofollow.  BUT, I have never seen a page with a cache date that was 6-12 months ago.

It's possible that the cache just shows the on page information but that the data that Google gets and uses to update the link graph could take longer.  This could explain why we often see "new" links in WMT that were actually made months or years ago.

In response to Wiqas, who wanted to see an example of a Penguin recovery, they can happen.  Below is the non-branded Google organic traffic for a site for which we did a thorough audit, removal and disavow project.  It is important to note though that this site had a really good base of natural links and continues to truly attract natural links.  If that is not present then recovery is unlikely to happen.

penguin-recovery-brand-excluded-organic.png

[Kingof5]

I'm a bit confused here.

Penguin is an algorithmic penalty, not a manual action. Reconsideration requests are only used when manual actions are applied, not algorithmic penalties and you clearly said you submitted a reconsideration request and had the penalty revoked.

So were you caught in both a manual action penalty and Penguin algorithmic penalty at the same time? Please clarify. I've submitted disavows for both our sites in the last few months and I'm always interested in hearing others experiences with this.

[gazzerman1]

We were hit with an unnatural links penalty on 23rd of July 2012. (full story here)

The effects of the Penguin algorithm lead to the unnatural links penalty.

Google claims to ignore all bad links but when you reach a certain point they want to make you aware of it and accountable. That's when you get the manual penalty.

Without a warning there are tons of websites out there who are about to trigger a manual penalty because the website owners have no clue about this stuff. The disavow file can be used to protect you from the penguin algorithm triggering a manual penalty.

The fact your site can also be affected by the links with no warning is so counter productive to good search results. If Google says they ignore them already then your site should simply lose the benefit of those links not also receive negative effects as a result. I am going to reconfirm this point with John at the next hangout.