How long will this Site be punished? (place your bets!)

[IsHot]

Got hit with a manual penalty in Feb2014. Got it removed in 6 months (before the Penguin refresh). Whole site got deindexed at one point including BRAND searches. (Brand searches has since come back)

Disavowed over 20k domains (yea spam was bad). But still have a good amount of authority links such as huff post, edu, wiki, apple apps, reddit etc. About 97% of our links are on page 2 or beyond. Cant get past that spot 11 'Wall'. The suppression machine is not kind. We even had a very popular article get tons of shares, media pick up, and the original article would not rank on the first page for its title.

Our 'brand + keyword' gets about 2k searches a month. Just 'keyword' gets nothing, which i find amusing.

So whats the prognosis doc? Another year, 3 or never? Anyone else in same boat? Wait for the next penguin refresh and hope for the best?

Cheers

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[Millermore]

I don't think anyone can give you a real answer to that question. Any answer would be speculation. There's also not enough info here.

Have you gone through Google Search Console and looked under Manual Actions? How does the rest of GSC look in terms of errors and such?

I would try using the Moz Span Analysis tool and see if you missed any other bad links.

It sounds like it could be possible that Google is manually banning you from the first page. I don't know if that is a real thing or if they actually do that, but I suppose that could be possible! Have you tried sending a message to Google explaining all the steps you have taken to try to remove all spam?

[IsHot]

Yah i figure most of it would be speculation - just doing due diligence to see if i missed anything.

We've gone through GSC with a comb. No manual penalties remain(in there), received the whole 'congrats you're out of jail 'message. Still add to the disavow list every month. Did a whole onsite audit to fix any on page issues (404s, thin content, meta tags etc) Made the site responsive as well. Planning a site redesign shortly which hopefully does something.

Message to Google? How do i do that lol. Do you mean through the google product forums, or is there an actual email? We have our Adwords reps, but they have done all they can to pass along our message.

Thanks for the response!

[Millermore]

It might be worth it to switch domain names at the end of the day, depending on how important it is to you.

Fortunately, I've never had to do it, but I've read a million times that after you disavow links and try to get rid of bad links the best you can, at some point, after you've literally attempted to get rid of each and every link that has the potential of causing you issues, you have this option to write a "reconsideration request" to Google.

Read this guide, it's great, and the reconsideration request is mentioned in Step 7: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal

Best of luck! Let us know if anything changes in the future!

[IsHot]

Yah it took us 6 reconsideration letters to get out of the 'manual penalty'.  I thought you meant there was another way to contact them after the fact.