Google penalty was lifted when an SSL was added, only to come back. Have you seen this?

[mgordon]

We took on a client who is under penalty (various reasons).  The solution was a ground up new website with fresh content, domain, everything.

This client has everything "right" in Google.  Everything you would want a client to do, he's done.  Great reviews, great offsite engagement, video, etc.

Recently we updated his SSL and for about 1 week he came off penalty, only to come back on penalty  (top three for every major term in a very competitive market back to around page three).  Do you have any experience with this and if so, I'd love to hear your advice/rational of why this occurred and what it means?

[MarieHaynes]

Is this a manual action that you can see in Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions?

It sounds like you're saying that this isn't a manual action, but rather, the site was not ranking well and then when you implemented https it recovered to high rankings and then shortly after it resumed ranking poorly.

There are many different filters and algorithms that Google uses to determine quality. When a site switches to https, the URLs are different and I do think it's possible that some of the dampening filters (such as Panda for example) could lift off. However, as Google recrawls the site and assesses it in the eyes of these algorithms, then whatever quality problems were there previously would eventually surface again.

To me though, this situation is exciting because this really does seem like evidence that the site is being suppressed. Often it's hard to tell whether there is suppression present or whether the site simply doesn't deserve to rank well. It sounds like there are some issues that still need to be addressed.