How long before your rankings improved after Penguin?

[netviper]

Those of you that have algorithmic penalties, how long after making changes did you actually see an improvement, or have you ever?

I have several sites that tanked after Penguin 2.1 and after doing Link Removal, Diasvaow files and building newer more quality links and adding content, I am STILL not seeing any change in rankings after several months.

I have heard from some people it can take up to 6-months for google to even crawl a disavow file.  I have also heard no matter what you do it won't matter until Google does another update.

I feel like we have made a lot of changes in the right direction, but I don't want to go overboard if nothing is going to matter until another Google Update is done.

What are your experiences?

[James77]

I think its very unlikely it takes 6 months for a disavow file to be processed - I have heard ranges from a couple of weeks to a couple months but no more.

If your talking about an algorithmic penalty (like penguin) then most likely you should see more gradual changes than if it were a manual penalty (which you would need to get removed via a re-inclusion request to see improvement).

When you mention 'go overboard' then that is a matter for you to decide what is a good and bad link, but in my opinion if you are under any penalty you need to be pretty thorough in removing all links that you think could be causing you issues.

[GlobeRunner]

Dave, it's entirely possible for sites to start ranking again really quickly, within days or weeks. The problem is not that it's taking Google a long time to process the disavow file. The problem lies with the actual links in that disavow file to be recrawled by Google. Since those are low quality links it will take some time (usually) for them to recrawl them. From what I understand, Google has to crawl a URL first and see the link: then they look at the disavow file in order to 'process' that link (to disavow that link).

It's the crawling that it taking time: not the processing of the disavow file.

So, to speed up recovery, you'll need to get those disavowed links crawled again. Or force Google to recrawl them.

[netviper]

How would you force google to recrawl them?