How long to recover from manual spam penalty?
-
If anyone doesn't think that spam sabotage is possible, here is proof. In February we received a suspicious spammy link notice and penalty from Google. We did several things to try and fix the problem including getting old links from not very relevant sites removed and submitted, and were denied, reconsideration twice. On the advice of Billy here on the forum, we went through the bottom end of our inbound links through OSE and found about forty domains that had linked to us and were purely trash sites full of link spam. We filed another reconsideration request listing every one of these sites along with dates we tried to contact the site owner (almost always impossible) to delete links to our site and two weeks later we received a note back that the manual penalty had been lifted.
My question now is, from your experience, how long does it take to notice a recovery from this penalty?
This experience also has me concerned that site sabotage is actually pretty simple when you can plant garbage links from 40 sites, many of which are the same with different urls, and get someone penalized on Google.
-
For the first site, it took 2 weeks and was successful on the first try. I know exactly which links were suspect and detailed the removal of the ones under my control and my requests for removal of the others (only about 50% of which were deleted). I think they considered that I reformed my spamming ways, and so lifted the penalty.
The second site took three separate RRs over a period of about 2 months, each time more links were removed to satisfy them. The site went from 600 root linking domains to about 150.
-
So two days ago the majority of our rankings took a jump up with a few falling slightly. Our organic Google traffic has been up over 65% since then. We have a long way to go before we are back where we were in January and hopefully this adjustment is the first of a good trend.
So in our case the answer to my initial question is that it took ten days to see the first improvements. Hopefully these aren't the last.
-
Hi Klarke,
What was the time gap between submitting the reconsideration request to Google and the "manual spam action - revoked" message received from Google.
-
Fortunately, these bad links represented a very small number of the links to our site so we will hopefully see a strong rebound in the next few days.
-
I agree with Klarke's assessment.
Some sites recover almost fully due to their rankings not being propped up by the negative links. Other sites are no where close to where they were before the penalty. All of the penalty removals I have worked with have had their rankings improve after the penalty was removed, but the amount of recovery varies widely.
-
I've had two different sites recover from manual spam actions. The first one regained all of it search positions (and even ranks better now) within one week after receiving the "manual spam action - revoked" message.
The second one received the same message, but hasn't been able to regain its rankings.
The difference between them is that first had really good links and some bad ones that Google probably wasn't even counting in the first. So when the penalty was revoked, the rankings returned as they were before.
The second though had alot of bad links. Many of those were helping it rank, so when they were removed ...the rankings went with them. But it was clear that the penalty was lifted at about 10 days after receiving the revoked message.
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
-
I just got hammered by a Google penalty - My guess is it was was keyword stuffing anchor text...help!
Hi, I just woke up to find my website had disappeared from search results in Google relevant to my business keywords. Looking back over the past few weeks I realise I went 'keyword heavy' in a few too many back links. I am careful to avoid websites with a high spam score and have varies anchor text well in the past. However, now the website has 86% less search visibility and I am being penalised for all searches apart from my brand name. I have tried to change as many back links with the keyword in question as I can but some links I can't change. My questions: Will this penalty be for good? What else can I do to rectify the situation?
Link Building | | sebgates0 -
How to Reduce the spam score of the website?
My website is www.naturesouq.com,it is a E-commerce Portal and Moz shows a spam score of 8,may i know why my site spam score is high and how can i reduce it,after all it is a dubai store portal.
Link Building | | offilery64 -
Frequency of Manual Link Building Monitoring
Hey Moz! We're in the middle of performing a link remediation campaign, and had a question regarding new links. We do not acquire any links through methods that break Google's guidelines, but we recently discovered a suspicious link to our website that happened organically. What is the recommended frequency for manually checking all newly discovered links to our website in order to catch/remove toxic links? Monthly? Bi-monthly? Yearly? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | TheDude0 -
How long it takes to see backlink ?
We are promoting a law related website and I have posted a blog as a guest on a Law related blog which has PR 3 and Alexa Ranking 171.. It's been 3 weeks but when i run a backlink report from OpenExplorer or other tools that i use, i cannot see the link coming through at all. There is no no follow attached. I'd like to continue to post more articles on the same website but i need to make sure i am getting good links from it otherwise i will go somewhere else. However, i need to understand why do i not get links from that blog as it is very reputable and good blog. I appreciate if you can advise please? Thanks!
Link Building | | Rubix0 -
Have you had 3 to 5 Google penalties lifted?
I've tried three times and have been unsuccessful. Is there any specific strategy or technique that has worked for you? Anyways, I'd like to speak with you if you have successfully had 3 to 5 penalties lifted. So please reach out to me. Thanks Dominic
Link Building | | amorbis0 -
We were penalized for a specific key phrase due to incoming links. How long to come back?
We were penalized for a specific key phrase, I had included a link using that phrase to the targeted page in a header on another site. This resulted in hundreds of identical lincoming links using that key phrase to the page, so I'm guessing that's what did it. I've since rectified the problem but about how long do you think it will take for the penalty to be dropped? We were knocked down about 10 places.
Link Building | | absoauto0 -
How long does it take for google see my new backlins and take an effect on my rank?
how long does it take for google see my new backlins and take an effect on my rank?
Link Building | | ctam0 -
Link Spamming or Not? Block Internal Search Results From Indexing?
We are looking at providing our customers with the best experience when performing a site search for a product. Would it be bad SEO practice to have our internal search results show results for all 4 Brands linking to different domains? This would mean multiple outgoing links to other owned sites from the same IP. Is it a best practice to block internal search results using robots.txt?
Link Building | | SEO-Team0