Penguin 2.1\. Bad links removed - do I need to wait for next Penguin upgrade to see recovery?

[StevieD]

Hi - I have read conflicting advice about this issue - after taking action and removing bad links following a Penguin 2.1 hit, will the site need to wait for the next Penguin upgrade before the link clean-up has any effect? Or will the cleaning of the links be acknowledged and "rewarded" with a ranking improvement before that (assuming all bad links were cleared out)?

[MarieHaynes]

In most cases, yes, you need to wait till the next refresh.  And even then, you've got to have the majority of your disavowed links recrawled before they are officially disavowed so you have to hope that most of your disavowed links are recrawled before Penguin refreshes.

We don't see a lot of sites recover from Penguin though.  The only ones that I have seen recover are truly high quality sites that have a good base of truly natural links once all of the bad ones are removed/disavowed.

[StevieD]

Thanks Marie - the second part of your answer is a concern.

The client we have been asked to deal with has a couple of sites one is an e-commerce food products site (this is the one that has been impacted by 2.1) the other is a much newer recipe site (focussed on recipes involving the food products sold on e-com site). This site has a different URL and is hosted on a different server.
So given what you said before - would it be a good strategy to focus on building up the recipe site so that they have a good presence in the SERPS and then they can move visitors to the e-comm site to buy product?. In short, continue to keep cleaning up the e-comm site but not focus new link build and content efforts on it, instead go all out on the recipe site.

Thanks.

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Steve,

I think that sounds like a good plan.  If the recipe site is gaining links naturally and isn't affected by Penguin then it might be better to work on that one and drive traffic to the main site with it.  I also like the idea to keep working on cleaning up the e-comm site in the meantime.

Good luck!

Marie