Do you see sites with unfixable Penguin penalties?

[BobGW]

Hello,

We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console.

Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup?

We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago.

Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone?

Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin.

Thanks.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It's very hard to say for certain Bob, without looking at it. It could be that Google is still taking exception at pages in the site, despite doorway pages have been removed.

Presumably you have asked Googlebot to crawl the site again?

-Andy

[David-Kley]

I've never seen a site that was "unfixable" just some that took a lot longer than others to recover.

What steps have you taken so far, and also what methods are you using to track the changes?

[BobGW]

We've done a disavow through Marie Haynes (wonderful work!) a month ago.

I forgot to re-submit the sitemap. Just did it.

We've got a bunch of 302 redirects, btw, I'm replacing them with 301s in the next couple of days.

We've deleted all doorways and paid links

We've added a blog with 8 pretty good articles - though they need more work and we need more content

We track the changes through a Moz campaign and sales volume, which both show we're hurting.

Only one area of our site is ranking (out of 15). Our home page is not even ranking for our main term, one of our internal pages is that doesn't even provide the right results.

We've got some question marks in our internal links

We've got some 404 errors

We've got some too long/too short/missing meta and title tags

We need to improve the alt tags

We've got enough backlinks and DA to be on page 1

Any help is appreciated.

[David-Kley]

Sounds like you have a good awareness of where to start looking. Without seeing what you have it will be difficult to diagnose. Can you PM me the URL? Could be another external factor besides the links that is causing the ranking issues.