How long for a Disavow file to take affect for a non-manual penalty?

[Brett-S]

Hi guys, hope you're all good, quick question in regards to a Disavow file.

A page of ours recently crashed from page 2 all the way to page 7ish. It's weird that it happened considering it was ranking on the 2nd page for around a year, then all of a sudden it came crashing down.

I identified an affiliate link which was placed in a sidebar, webmaster tools picked up 24,000+ links coming from the site so I have decided to disavow it. I disavowed the site around 3 days ago, and in the mean time we have managed to grab ourselves some very good do-follow links from very authoritative sites. At the moment the page has  gone up 1 page, sitting at 4-5th page, but the rankings have been very inconsistent.

Any ideas to when we may see an increase in ranking for this page? I am being very impatient, at the moment my workload has been dedicated to get this one page ranking again.

All comments greatly appreciated.

[StephanSolomonidis]

Unfortunately, there is no precise answer. The time taken will depend on how regularly Googlebot crawls your site, and how quickly it re-arranges the rankings for your site and in your industry. The short answer is: think weeks rather than days.

For example, if your domain is a powerful one, is frequently crawled, and has pages which rank well -- making this page something of an exception -- you could be expected to recover quite quickly. Perhaps even within a week or two. But the less these factors apply to you, the slower you can expect this process to take. Recovery will also depend on what else is happening at that time -- what are your competitors doing, how is the SERP changing, etc.

I'm sorry not to be able to give you a more precise answer. You shouldn't worry too much that three days have passed without much change. I wouldn't usually expect a full recovery within that time.

If you've done all you can with this page, raise that point with your boss if you have one. Show him/her Google's official guidance -- look right at the bottom of that page for their warning that the process takes weeks -- and move your workload towards other tasks if you can.

[Chris_Hickman]

As Stephen mentioned there's not an exact time frame on how quickly the changes will be seen. We at GetBackonGoogle.com submit many disavow lists for many different quality sites. Every site responds different, and it's important to continue building new, high quality links. Show the search engines you're making the proper changes and playing by their rules.

Did you try having the site remove the link, before adding it to a disavow list?

Often when you see the rankings jumping around that's a good sign. Search engines are moving your listing around to see where it fits properly. This is a great time to monitor the bounce rate and time on page. Make sure users are staying on the page and clicking through to additional pages, search engines will notice these things.

Nick

Adficient.com