Google admits it can take up to a year to refresh/recover your site after it is revoked from Penguin!
-
I found myself in an impossible situation where I was getting information from various people that seem to be "know it all's" but everything in my heart was telling me they were wrong when it came to the issues my site was having.
I have been on a few Google Webmaster Hangouts and found many answers to questions I thought had caused my Penguin Penalty. After taking much of the advice, I submitted my Reconsideration Request for the 9th time (might have been more) and finally got the "revoke" I was waiting for on the 28th of MAY.
What was frustrating was on May 22nd there was a Penguin refresh. This as far as I knew was what was needed to get your site back up in the organic SERPS.
My Disavow had been submitted in February and only had a handful of links missing between this time and the time we received the revoke. We patiently waited for the next penguin refresh with the surety that we were heading in the right direction by John Mueller from Google (btw.. John is a great guy and really tries to help where he can). The next update came on October 4th and our rankings actually got worse! I spoke with John and he was a little surprised but did not go into any detail.
At this point you have to start to wonder WHAT exactly is wrong with the website. Is this where I should rank? Is there a much deeper Panda issue. We were on the verge of removing almost all content from the site or even changing domains despite the fact that it was our brand name.
I then created a tool that checked the dates of every last cached date of each link we had in our disavow file. The thought process was that Google had not re-crawled all the links and so they were not factored into the last refresh. This proved to be incorrect,all the links had been re-cached August and September. Nothing earlier than that,which would indicate a problem that they had not been cached in time.
i spoke to many so called experts who all said the issue was that we had very few good links left,content issues etc.. Blah Blah Blah, heard it all before and been in this game since the late 90's, the site could not rank this badly unless there was an actual penalty as spam site ranked above us for most of our keywords.
So just as we were about to demolish the site I asked John Mueller one more time if he could take a look at the site, this time he actually took the time to investigate,which was very kind of him. he came back to me in a Google Hangout in late December, what he said to me was both disturbing and a relief at the same time. the site STILL had a penguin penalty despite the disavow file being submitted in February over 10 months ago! And the revoke in May.
I wrote this to give everyone here that has an authoritative site or just an old one, hope that not all is lots just yet if you are still waiting to recover in Google. My site is 10 years old and is one of the leaders in its industry. Sites that are only a few years old and have had unnatural link building penalties have recovered much faster in this industry which I find ridiculous as most of the time the older authoritative sites are the big trustworthy brands. This explains why Google SERPS have been so poor for the last year. The big sites take much longer to recover from penalties letting the smaller lest trustworthy sites prevail.
I hope to see my site recover in the next Penguin refresh with the comfort of knowing that my site currently is still being held back by the Google Penguin Penalty refresh situation.
Please feel free to comment below on anything you think is relevant.
-
We were hit with an unnatural links penalty on 23rd of July 2012. (full story here)
The effects of the Penguin algorithm lead to the unnatural links penalty.
Google claims to ignore all bad links but when you reach a certain point they want to make you aware of it and accountable. That's when you get the manual penalty.
Without a warning there are tons of websites out there who are about to trigger a manual penalty because the website owners have no clue about this stuff. The disavow file can be used to protect you from the penguin algorithm triggering a manual penalty.
The fact your site can also be affected by the links with no warning is so counter productive to good search results. If Google says they ignore them already then your site should simply lose the benefit of those links not also receive negative effects as a result. I am going to reconfirm this point with John at the next hangout.
-
I'm a bit confused here.
Penguin is an algorithmic penalty, not a manual action. Reconsideration requests are only used when manual actions are applied, not algorithmic penalties and you clearly said you submitted a reconsideration request and had the penalty revoked.
So were you caught in both a manual action penalty and Penguin algorithmic penalty at the same time? Please clarify. I've submitted disavows for both our sites in the last few months and I'm always interested in hearing others experiences with this.
-
I have a theory that the cache date on a page does not always represent the date that all of the links on the page were crawled. Google has said repeatedly that it can sometimes take 6 months to a year for the disavow file to fully take effect. In other words, if you have disavowed a particular link, it could take a year for Google to revisit that link and apply the invisible nofollow. BUT, I have never seen a page with a cache date that was 6-12 months ago.
It's possible that the cache just shows the on page information but that the data that Google gets and uses to update the link graph could take longer. This could explain why we often see "new" links in WMT that were actually made months or years ago.
In response to Wiqas, who wanted to see an example of a Penguin recovery, they can happen. Below is the non-branded Google organic traffic for a site for which we did a thorough audit, removal and disavow project. It is important to note though that this site had a really good base of natural links and continues to truly attract natural links. If that is not present then recovery is unlikely to happen.
-
Since Penguin 1 (April, 2012), I was closely observing and working for many websites to recover. Being honest, with all efforts, I have never seen a website that has fully recovered. Maximum recover is up to 50%. If anyone have better example, I love to see it.
I realized the fact in early 2013, if i work even 50% on new site as compared to recovery, I can rank better than my original website. So, I changed my policy. I started similar domains and ranked them. I promoted by original website through PPC & Social Media. And I am pretty much successful with my plan.
I feel for you and wish for your recovery soon. I agree with you at most of points.
Regards
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How long Google will take to Disavow a link?
Just want to know how long will Google take to Disavow a link? I uploaded my file on 18 Dec 2020 and today is 5th January 2021 and still, that link is appearing in my Search Console in Top linking domains. Anyone who recently done this practice and how long it took? I mentioned the domain name below and hopefully, it will disavow all the links [subdomain+www+without www] coming from that domain. domain:abcd.com Help me out, please...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seotoolsland.com0 -
1st Ecommerce site got penalized, can we start a 2nd one?
Hello, A client's first site got penalized by Goolge Penguin. It has recovered through cleaning up backlinks, but not to where it was before. It is 2nd and 3rd for several money keywords, but is far less successful than before penalization. We are starting a second site. Here's the important steps to mention The new site shows up first for it's domain name, and it has 30 pages indexed. It shows up NOWHERE for our leading search term. Out other site has a blog post that is 3rd for that search term. We are using new categories and new organization. We are using a different cart solution We are adding all unique content The home pages and some of the product pages are very thorough. We are adding comprehensive products like nothing else in the industry (10X) We plan on adding a very comprehensive blog, but haven't started yet. We've added the top 100 products so far. Our other store has 500. There's a lot of spam in the industry, so sites are slow to rank. Our category descriptions are 500 words Again, all unique content. No major errors in Moz Campaign tools Just a few categories so far, we're going to add many more. Same Google Analytics account as our other site It looks like we should eventually be on page 3 for our major search term. Again, we're nowhere for anything right now. ... Have you seen that Google will not rank a second site because it's from the same company and Google Analytics account, or does Google let you rank 2 sites in the same industry? We are hoping it's just slow to rank. If you can rank 2 sites, what are your best recommendations to help show up? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Mobile Redirect - Cloaking/Sneaky?
Question since Google is somewhat vague on what they consider mobile "equivalent" content. This is the hand we're dealt with due to budget, no m.dot, etc, responsive/dynamic is on the roadmap but still a couple quarters away but, for now, here's the situation. We have two sets of content and experiences, one for desktop and one for mobile. The problem is that desktop content does not = mobile content. The layout, user experience, images and copy aren't the same across both versions - they are not dramatically different but not identical. In many cases, no mobile equivalent exists. Dev wants to redirect visitors who find the desktop version in mobile search to the equivalent mobile experience, when it exists, when it doesn't they want to redirect to the mobile homepage - which really isn't a homepage it's an unfiltered view of the content. Yeah we have push state in place for the mobile version etc. My concern is that Google will look at this as cloaking, maybe not in the cases where there's a near equivalent piece of content, but definitely when we're redirecting to the "homepage". Not to mention this isn't a great user experience and will impact conversion/engagement metrics which are likely factors Google's algorithm considers. What's the MOZ Community say about this? Cloaking or Not and Why? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jose_R0 -
Can H1 and Meta title be exactly the same ?
I've heard from some SEO's that H1 and Meta Title shouldn't be exactly the same, why ? Both of them describe what is ON the page right ? Why is it Spammy? Is it ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tintanus2 -
Can you disavow a spamy link that is not pointing to your website?
We have submitted several really spammy websites to the Google spam team. We noticed they take a very long time to react to submissions. Do you know if it is possible to disavow a link that is not pointing to your website but rather to a very spammy website? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Powered by/Credit backlinks and nofollow
Pseudo question: I have a website that has 100K pages. On about 50K of those pages I have information that is fed to me via an outside 3rd-party website. Now, I like to give credit where credit is due, so I add a backlink to the website that is feeding me this content. A simple backlink like so: Information provided by: Company ABC Now, this 3rd-party website wants me to remove the nofollow tags from the backlink, but I am very, very skeptical because to me, sending ~50K dofollow backlinks to a single site might make the Google monster upset with me. This 3rd-party site is being very hard-headed about this, to the point where I am thinking of terminating the relationship all together. I digress. Scoured the net before writing this, but couldn't really find anything directly related to my issue. Thoughts? Is a nofollow required here? We're not talking 1 or 2 links here; we're talking tens of thousands (50K is low; it will probably be upwards of 100K when all is said and done as my site has many, many pages). Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | THB0 -
Backlinks According to Google
Good Morning, Google has just recognized some links going to my site. I used a seo toolbar downloaded from firefox that informed me of the Links according to Google. My question is that them links have been there for ages and Google has only just recognized them. Is there a reason for this? Does Google only show links quarterly or half yearly? Thanks SEO_123
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TWPLC_seo0 -
Switching prices for google base
We would like to be able to submit lower prices to google than we do to other sources. How i see it working is that at the end of each url we submit to google base there is a tracking code (source=googlebase). When a user visits the site via one of these urls we would knock 10% of the price of that item and store the item in a cookie to ensure that the price of that item, for that user would stay at the low price for 24 hours. My question is whether google would have a problem with us doing this? The second part of my question is whether they check the full url including the query strings? If theyt just checked the canocial URL they would see a price thats 10% higher than the one we submitted to base - which, of course - would be bad
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | supermarketonline0