How long Penguin takes to forgive you after backlink cleanup

[BobGW]

Hello,

In a site I'm working on, there was a bunch of link farms. We cleaned them all up about 6 weeks ago. There's no evidence of them in any backlink profile anymore.

My sense is that Google Penguin hasn't forgiven this site yet. I think our backlink profile is now clean.

What experience do you guys have with the time it takes to be forgiven? And what content/site changes can I make to help be forgiven, even if they are large content/site changes?

Thanks!

Bob

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I have seen recoveries in 6-8 weeks and others have reported it taking 8-12 months - so there and anywhere inbetween.

No hard and fast rules for this one I'm afraid because it depends wholly upon Google visiting a site and applying the necessary flags.

-Andy

[DonnaDuncan]

And it's not just your site that Google has to visit. If you have successfully removed (not just disavowed) links pointing to you from other sites, Google has to visit those as well.

[EGOL]

Most sites never recover.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

They do when I do it

[EGOL]

lol.  That does not surprise me.

[MarieHaynes]

If the site was hit with Penguin then in order to see recovery the following needs to happen:

-Thorough link cleanup

-Google needs to recrawl the majority if not all of the removed/disavowed links to recognize that they are now gone.

-The Penguin algorithm needs to rerun. (More info here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-recovery-required-19115.html)

Given we haven't had a refresh of Penguin since December, this is why you haven't seen improvement. Now, there are other algorithms that use links, so some sites can see some improvement right after doing a link cleanup, but if Penguin is the issue then you're going to need to wait. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing when the next rerun will happen and I'm thinking it's going to be a few months yet given that the search quality team is working hard on Panda right now.

Another point to add - I have seen many sites recover from Penguin, but IMO the only ones that actually make a decent recovery are ones that have truly good content that has attracted links naturally.

[BobGW]

Holy crap Marie, this strikes me as the golden truth. Right now our content is moderate. We're changing that fast. We're adding targeted user oriented thorough blog posts - 2 a week. We just started.

What advice do you have for me about the content given what I just said?

[MarieHaynes]

That would be a tough question to answer without significantly digging in to the site. I would say that the best advice I can give for most sites is to switch the mindset from "How can we get links?" to "How can we make this the site that is the most useful of its kind?"

We used to advocate blogging as much as possible so that we can get as much content as possible on the site, but now the goal, IMO is to only put really high quality stuff on the site. If no one is engaging with your content, then it's likely not content that Google wants to rank highly. But, if you can find a way to produce stuff that is truly helpful and unique then you're likely going to do well.

[BobGW]

Thanks. Yes, I totally agree. That's the goal. We're just aggressive. Hopefully not too aggressive.