Penguin: Recovery from Algorithm

[panini]

Hi Mozzers,

A quick question regarding Google Penguin recovery. A domain I have was hit by Penguin and we got a message in Webmaster Tools. We went to work fixing links we thought were most harmful, documented the evidence and did a reconsideration request.

Google's reply was "No manual spam actions found".

If reconsideration requests aren't the way to go then of course I will continue to build good natural links. But if I remove more links which I consider to be harmful will I ever know if the penalty is removed? Is there a point at which the algorithm would remove the penalty and inform me?

Thanks!

[trickshotric]

Seems like you might have an algorithmic penalty instead (Google don't tell you when you have these). Have you done anything dodgy on your website?

How badly have you been hit? Could it just be other sites overtaking you?

Post the domain and I'll have a look.

[MarieHaynes]

What was the message that you got in WMT?  It seems odd that you would have a message and then get told that there is no penalty.  However, if you got a message of unnatural links in (I think) July, there were a bunch of those that went out by mistake and then a few days later a different message came in basically saying not to worry about it.

Penalties because of a message of unnatural links in WMT are manual warnings.  However, Penguin is an algorithmic change.  It is believed that you can only recover from Penguin once the algorithm refreshes (although no one knows that for sure.)

The problem with Penguin recovery is that there are very few well documented cases of recovery.  The last time the Penguin algorithm refreshed was October 5.  At that time the disavow tool didn't exist.  We are eager to see what happens once the algo refreshes again and see if sites that have disavowed their manipulative links will recover.

One thing that we do know is that you will need good, natural links in order to recover and that is hard to do!

[trickshotric]

I actually have 3 fully documented cases of penguin recovery to my own sites!! I have started writing one up but it's currently 22 pages long!! (Messages from google included in that!) I plan to post a refined version of it in a couple of weeks. Hopefully it helps people out!

[panini]

Hi Richard and Marie,

Thanks for the replies so far. We did the first generic warning asking for a reconsideration request then the second message saying "..for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole".

In this instance did our drop in rankings result purely from some of inbound links being excluded from then? Are these links of no worry or consequence to us as Google have essentially disavowed them from being of any value? That's certainly the conclusion I'm getting.

We did stop link building in light of these messages and that has no doubt let other sites take over and improve their rankings while ours stagnated a bit.

[trickshotric]

I had same that message during my midway battle clearing a penatly. Google said that they were being "extremely granular", however, they said that we should send another reconsideration request if we had made any further process in cleaning up the links.

We all got very excited at this point, however, despite some improvement we didn't get back to where we should be (taking into account that we lost 1000s of bad links).

Rankings started to drop again so....

From this point we sent a further 3 reconsideration requests. 2 were rejected and the final one (after all spammy links were finally removed (thank you disavow tool!)) was accepted. "we have revoked the penalty on your site".

So from experience I would not stop cleaning up the site just because you received that message.