Rankings after manual penalty removal

[Sandeep_Matharu]

I've just started working on a ecommerce website that was hit by Penguin 2.0 in May (It was ranking 2nd for it's major keyword at the time) and it hasn't been indexing for that keyword since

After a lot of link removal, the reconsideration request was accepted and the manual penalty had been removed. Rankings haven't really improved and that specific keyword has not been reindexed

The site does have a lot of not found errors (It was 5.5k but recently taken down to 4k) but it was still ranking before the penalty. Is there anything you believe I'm missing? Is it the onsite errors that are flagging the site as unreliable? I thought it would still appear for the keyword if that was the case

[TomRayner]

Hi there

Well there's a couple of things to check here.  You mention you had a manual penalty on the site, but that you were affected by the penguin 2.0 update?

Penguin is algorithmic, not manual.  If you had the manual penalty removed, in theory you could still be under the effects of the Penguin penalty, if your backlink profile is still over-optimised for example.  I think this is unlikely, however.

Your onsite errors may be causing a problem if it is affecting the crawling of your site.  If access to the site is being consistently interrupted, or the Googlebot is crawling the wrong stuff for example, that may be having an impact.

What I think is the real problem though is that you're now left with a much smaller amount of links now that you've conducted a link removal.  In essence, without those links (good or bad), you've set your site's SEO value to zero again.  In order to recover rankings, you need to replenish and replace those links removed with more high quality ones - ones that are contextual, relevant and on authoritative websites.

Hope this helps.

[Sandeep_Matharu]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the response. We received the manual penalty at the same time Penguin 2.0 was released (Some point around May 22nd)

We've got some really impressive content marketing pieces in place for the next few months so hopefully the value we'll gain through that will replace the links that were removed

Thanks again