Manual Penalty Removed - Recovery Times...

[RobertChapman]

Howdy Mozzers,

For anyone who has had experience of a manual penalty i'd appreciate your feedback.

How long did it take to recover from a Manual Penalty?

Of course every situation is different and its only been 8 days so perhaps it's to soon.

Below is the email we received, I highlighted "believed" they didn't state we had. We highlighted a bunch of back links we didn't like however most of these remain in our profile in GWT so not sure what was really the problem.

"Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site."

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

[AndreVanKets]

Great news!

As they said, give it a month or two and you'll start seeing your rankings improve.

They probably apply these penalties in bulk and then manually review when reconsideration requests come through. Whoever analysed your profile saw nothing majorly wrong so lifted the ban.

My 2c worth.

[Marcus_Miller]

You just have to be patient here, I have seen sites bounce back in days and others take weeks. If the penalty is revoked, it should bounce back though so just try to hold fire.

The one caveat here is that there have been a whole bunch of updates and I am working with a few sites that seemingly have a manual penalty along with a bunch of panda and penguin issues. We have resolved some of the panda issues and made some improvements, we can still see a bunch of penguin type issues that we are waiting for a data refresh on and we are waiting for a response on the manual thing.

Point being, that you may not bounce back to where you were and it's possible you may have snowballed a few more problems along the way.

So, keep an eye on analytics, wait too see if you have a bounce back and then dig into your site to see if you have penguin or panda issues holding you back as well.

This is worth a quick watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES01L4xjSXE&feature=player_embedded

Marcus

[RobertChapman]

Great Video!

As you say, if the manual penalty removal doesn't allow traffic bounce back then I will be looking at any penguin related issues that I need to work on.

At the moment our big focus is on creating high quality unique content for high quality sites. Whilst focussing on all the on page/on site content in our control to make sure everything is up to scratch.

I'll keep you posted.

[RobertChapman]

Thanks for the 2c.

Keeping my eyes peeled, fingers crossed and working on the good stuff!

[RobertFisher]

Hello Robert,

I will give you a method here that may assist you on the reindex side:

In GWMT go to Health> Fetch as Googlebot

In the url space following the initial domain, put an offending page and then click Fetch

It usually takes less than 5 seconds and you will see "success" with a green check mark followed by a button for Submit to Index. (Given the situation, I highly urge you to click it!

Note: If the entire site is affected, you will want to use URL and Linked pages on submission (you only get ten of these per month) and if not, just that url. (You get 500 Fetches a month).

This should help get you indexed more rapidly. PLEASE do not tell anyone as it is a secret!!

Good Luck,

Robert

[MarieHaynes]

I've seen some sites come back within a day or two of a manual penalty being removed.  But, for others it can take a couple of weeks or even a few months.  The difference is the degree of "spamminess" that you had before the penalty.  If you had some really nasty blackhat stuff going on then you're more likely to have a longer penalty.

However, as others have mentioned, you could also have a Penguin issue on top of the warning in which case you won't get the full extent of your recovery until another Penguin refresh runs.

[RobertChapman]

Forehead slapping moment, I know of this. Just for some reason hadn't thought to give it a go!

Thanks you. I'll keep you posted on the outcome.

Ps. if you don't want more people to know, perhaps take it off the public domain! Ha

[RobertChapman]

Hi Marie,

Thanks for the feedback. Hopefully it won't be months as we have already been suffering since May.

If there are underlying algorithmic issues related to Penguin...we would have a notice right?

Thanks for the feedback, greatly appreciated.

[MarieHaynes]

Unfortunately there is no warning given at all for sites hit by Penguin.  Hopefully yours is just a manual unnatural links penalty!

[RobertChapman]

That was the original email - Google has detected evidence of unnatural link building.

We're still not entirely sure what caused the issue. I assume it was in our last reconsideration request but at that point we were just hoping.