Should I continue adding new content on the website penalized by Google?

[pianomother]

I have a website that is imposed partial action by Google due to unnatural links.  We are in the process to clean up those links.  At the same time, I want to add more content to the same website.  My concern is whether the new content pages will be affected by Google's action as well.  Should I wait until we finish the cleanup and get a green light from Google?  In addition, will it be worth doing some on-page optimization on the pages that are affected by unnatural links and Google's penalty?  Please advise.

Thanks.

John

[Berner]

Hi John,

Although I am no expert, but my research and thinking is that if you are being hit by a domain wide penalty, then yes any new content will also suffer as it is an extension of your penalized domain.

Now even one page can cause a whole site some issues. Just as with most the homepage carries the unnatural links, so the whole site hurts because of it.

I am sure an expert will chime in soon, Best Wishes

[JaneCopland]

Hi John,

If the penalty is solely related to inbound links and you are cleaning these up, the content will suffer while your penalty exists (i.e. it won't start ranking well, as it's housed on the bad domain), but once the penalty is lifted, the content should have no trouble ranking, even though it was added when the site was under penalty. The same goes for the on-page optimisation: you'd be doing this for the future, not for the present. It won't help you in the short term, but you should still benefit from the improvements when the site is no longer suffering because of its inbound links.

Cheers,

Jane

[MarieHaynes]

The answer really depends on what type of penalty you have, but in most cases, your whole site will be affected and the new content will likely struggle.  There are some cases where only a certain part of a website or even certain keywords are affected by a penalty and new content could still thrive, but that's not as common.

Still, if you can add good fresh content then I would continue to do so!  This can be a sign of good faith to Google that you are actively working on improving your website.  You can even link to this content in your reconsideration request to show Google that you are doing all you can to make your website as helpful to users as possible.