Very Slow Recovery after Manual Penalty Removed - Are we missing something?

[Ham1979]

Our site was handed a manual penalty in November 2013 where exact match anchor text and low quality directory submissions seemed to be the problem. We began the process of link removal, reconfiguration and disavowing.

We had already planned to change our domain in early 2014 to coincide with our SSL certificate renewal and although we were hesitant to do this with the manual penalty still there we proceeded and 301'd most of the site but left the pages that were the landing page for most of the exact match links as 302 to the new domain.

We continued to work on removing the manual penalty for the old domain as we didn't want it to pass over to the new one and eventually this was removed n March 2014

Now the penalty is gone are we safe to change those 302 redirects to 301 so everything redirects. The problem we have is that six months on, a lot of the pages for the old domain are still indexed and even though we are indexed for the new domains are rankings haven't recovered.

Is it just a case of needing to build up a new quality link profile to replace the links that were disregarded or removed when recovering from the penalty or we missing something else

[GPainter]

Is it just a case of needing to build up a new quality link profile to replace the links that were disregarded or removed when recovering from the penalty.

Spot on, many people remove links etc. when removing a link and after removing say 25% of their portfolio are surprised to find they drop in rankings if you were to do it with out the penalty you would find a similar problem. After moving sites it is also normal to have a bit of a dip though if you did it back in March would expect to start to even up now assuming you redirected correctly and all the relevant pages etc.

Remember when creating links after a penalty your a bit more vulnerable to future penalties to try to play it safe!

Best of luck.

[Ham1979]

Thanks for your reply

Do you think we're safe to change the 302 redirects to a 301 now that the penalty has been lifted from the old domain?

The hesitation is that the penalty may have been lifted because we made those old pages 302 but if there are good links we would like them pointing to the pages on the new domain

[GPainter]

A manual action is normally on links coming in not going out so you should be safe if you've cleaned your link profile etc.