[Build Backlinks Online] After a Link-Based Penalty is Removed, Will Your Traffic Increase?

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'After a Link-Based Penalty is
Removed, Will Your Traffic Increase?'

Posted by MarieHaynes
Are you familiar with the feeling of dread that comes with seeing this message
in Webmaster Tools?





Or perhaps, you haven't received a message, but have seen something like this
in your analytics:





If you've received a traffic drop because of a link-based Google penalty, the
results can be devastating. There are many articles written on what steps can be
taken to recover, but not many on what to expect once you have done the work to
get out of the penalty. Will your traffic increase suddenly? Will you see any
increase at all? Will you see a decrease in traffic because you have disavowed
links?


If you are looking for good information on understanding these penalties and
how to do the work to remove them, here are some good articles:


The Difference Between Penguin and an Unnatural Links Penalty


Lifting a Manual Penalty Given by Google


Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo


How WMPU Recovered from the Penguin Update


The remainder of this article will talk about what outcome you can expect if
you are dealing with one of the following scenarios:


1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty


2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty


3. Escaping the Penguin algorithm

1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty

To determine whether or not you have a partial action penalty, go to Webmaster
Tools â Search Traffic â Manual Actions and you should see the
following:




The message from the screenshot reads:


Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or
manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of
the webmaster's control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on
the unnatural links instead of on the site's ranking as a whole.


Usually, when you receive a partial action warning you will get the following
message in your Webmaster Tools:


Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to
http://www.example.com


Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com,


We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are
outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.


Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your
site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural
linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link
schemes.


We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality
guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for
reconsideration in Google's search results.


If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or
remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.


If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our
Webmaster Help Forum for support.


Sincerely,


Google Search Quality Team


Occasionally, you will get a more cryptic message such as the following:


We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using
techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.


We don't want to put any trust in links that are unnatural or artificial, and
we recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize
that some links may be outside of your control. As a result, for this specific
incident we are taking very targeted action to reduce trust in the unnatural
links. If you are able to remove any of the links, you can submit a
reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.


If you have any questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum.


I have noticed that most sites that receive the "cryptic" message usually end
up losing rankings. And, in many cases, the sites were affected by the next
Penguin update. I would recommend that if you have a partial action, no matter
what message you received, you need to take steps to remove the warning. There
may be a few exceptions; if the manual spam action viewer tells you that a
particular page of your site is affected, it is possible that only that page of
your site has been demoted. An example would be if you were running a news site
and had published a story that was beneficial to a particular business. If that
business had built unnatural links to that page on your site in an effort to get
that page to rank higher, this could cause a warning for just that one page. If
this is the case, then you may not need to do anything as only that page is
likely affected and not your whole site.


In my opinion, for the vast majority of sites that have a partial action
message, it is vitally important for you to take the proper steps to get the
penalty removed.


In order to remove these penalties, a very thorough backlink audit must be
done. I have found that it is not enough to just address the worst of the links,
or even the most recently obtained unnatural links. Once you have gone under the
microscope of manual review, Google wants to see that you have made attempts to
remove almost every single manipulative link that was made in the past.


Success: Manual spam action revoked! Now what?





You've done the cleanup, and achieved success! The joy of seeing a manual spam
action revoked message never gets old for me. This message is usually the end
result of many weeks (or often months) of hard work. I love the emails that I
get from relieved site owners after they have seen this message. Invariably, one
of the next questions asked is, "When will I see my rankings improve?" This
question can make my heart drop because quite often, after a partial action
warning is removed, not much changes. I am always careful to explain this to
site owners when I first take them on as clients, but it seems that many of
them, despite my warnings, are still expecting to see a return to top rankings
once their penalty is lifted. Now, don't get me wrong; some sites do show
improvement, as I will show you soon. But with a partial action the improvement
is rarely drastic.


There are three types of traffic patterns that I tend to see once a partial
action warning has been removed:

Outcome #1 (most common): No improvement

Unfortunately, for many sites that have a partial action revoked, here is what
I usually see in their analytics data:





It is heartbreaking for a small business owner to go through months of work
evaluating and removing backlinks that they had paid for a well-known SEO
company to create, get their penalty revoked, and then see absolutely no
improvement.


Why would there be no improvement after a partial manual action is revoked?
For many sites, the only reason why they were ranking well before their penalty
was because of the power of unnatural links. In most cases, these businesses
have paid an SEO company to improve their rankings. Often, the SEO company has
stated that their techniques all fall within the Google Quality Guidelines, and
so the site owners are happy to see the great results and have no idea that a
penalty could happen. (I wrote about this type of problem about 18 months ago.
Many said that I was wrongly criticizing SEOs and that my article should have
been targeted only at cheap overseas link builders, but I have seen many sites
that were penalized after hiring well-known, reputable SEO companies that used
low-quality methods to obtain links on a large scale.)


For the site whose analytics chart is shown above, the rankings were primarily
gained through submissions to low-quality directories, bookmarks, and article
syndication. Once the penalty was given, Google stopped counting the PageRank
that was formerly received from these links. The resulting drop in link equity
resulted in a decrease in rankings. But, the work that was done to remove the
partial action warning, did not do anything to replace that lost link equity.
When those links were removed (or disavowed) there were very few links left to
support rankings. For many sites that have a partial action warning, the result,
once the spam action is revoked is that nothing changes.


So, why would a site even go through the trouble to get the penalty removed?
Are they doomed no matter what? No! It is certainly possible for a site to see
improvement some time later. For example, if a site escapes Penguin (because the
work that was done to get rid of the partial match action is the same work that
needs to be done to escape Penguin), or if a site starts to gain natural links
(either through good SEO efforts or naturally), then improvements can happen.
Those improvements would not have happened if the work was not done to escape
the manual action. I sometimes look at a partial match warning as a bit of a
blessing. Most sites that get demoted by the Penguin algorithm have no way of
knowing whether or not they have done the work necessary to be released from the
jaws of Penguin. But, if you have done the work required to get rid of a partial
match penalty, then you likely know that you have done enough to escape Penguin
as well.


Although many sites see no immediate improvement once their partial match
warning is lifted, there are some sites who do see an immediate improvement.

Outcome #2: Some improvement, but not a complete recovery

This can happen when the manual action is just affecting certain keywords.
But, unfortunately, in my experience, there is no real way of knowing whether
just certain keywords are being penalized or whether the penalty is on the whole
site.


An example of a situation where a site would be penalized just for certain
keywords would be if you had widespread publication of a widget in which you
linked back to your site using keyword anchor text. If you have used the anchor
text, "Widget provided by pretty green dresses," there is a possibility that
Google has given you a keyword penalty for "pretty green dresses." Once the
penalty is lifted, provided that your site has enough natural links and
relevance to support rankings for "pretty green dresses," then you may see some
improvement that happens within days of getting the penalty lifted.


Here is a quote from Matt Cutts where he describes how Google could penalize a
site on a keyword level:





Here is an example of a site that had been penalized for a particular set of
keywords and saw a slight increase in rankings once their partial action was
lifted:





The site had been penalized for some main keywords. Once the penalty was
lifted, some of those keywords started to see a return to first-page rankings
(but only to the bottom of the first page rather than their former #1 rankings,
which is why the recovery is not more dramatic).


In some cases, if a site has been penalized for just certain keywords,
recovery from a partial action can be close to 100% if the site has a really
good base of natural links, but in my experience this does not happen often.

Outcome #3: No immediate recovery, but improvement happens once Penguin
refreshes

A site usually cannot escape from Penguin until Google refreshes the Penguin
algorithm. For sites that see no improvement (or only a small improvement) when
their manual penalty is lifted, it is very possible that there will be further
improvement the next time that Penguin refreshes. For the two analytics charts
shown above, these sites have not seen a Penguin refresh since their penalty was
lifted. (The last refresh at the time of writing this article was October 5,
2013 and both of those sites had penalties lifted later on in October.) I
suspect that once Google refreshes Penguin, these sites will see some
improvement. See the section below on Penguin recovery for more information on
what to expect when a Penguin hit site escapes the Penguin algorithm.

2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty

If you have a sitewide penalty, you will see something like this in your
manual actions viewer in Webmaster Tools:




In this case, a yellow alert tells you that "This site may not perform as well
in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster
Guidelines." Google then adds the following message with a bit more detail:


Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or
manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. These may be the result of
buying links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.


In most cases, a site with a sitewide manual action will not be ranking in
Google for their brand terms, and quite often, even a search for their url will
fail to show the site. This type of penalty is devastating. Usually this penalty
comes as a result of very obvious manipulation of the search engine results.
Every site that I have worked on that had a sitewide penalty had been involved
in a variety of link schemes including purchasing links, creating large numbers
of interlinked microsites or very widespread creation of spammy backlinks.


The steps that need to be taken to remove a sitewide penalty are exactly the
same as you would take for a partial match penalty, but the results are usually
more rewarding. Once a sitewide penalty is removed, there is almost always an
increase in traffic, although often it is just for brand terms.


Here is a site that showed a significant improvement once their sitewide
penalty was removed:





It looks impressive, doesn't it? Within a couple of days of getting their
penalty removed, the site started to rank extremely well again for brand terms.
Traffic increased dramatically almost overnight. However, did you notice that I
didn't show you the whole picture? Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot that
shows the traffic prior to getting penalized. This site previously was getting
several times this amount of traffic. When the sitewide penalty was lifted, the
branded traffic increased, but the site did not regain most of their non-branded
keyword rankings as those were primarily propped up on the power of links that
Google is no longer counting.


While some sites only see a return for brand terms after a sitewide penalty is
revoked, we have seen a number of sites that have had very dramatic improvements
across the board. Here is a site that was hit severely with a sitewide penalty.
Within 24 hours of receiving notification that their manual spam action was
revoked, they began ranking well for brand terms. A few days later, the majority
of their keyword rankings returned as well:





When a sitewide penalty is removed, in my experience, it usually takes 24-48
hours for brand terms to start ranking highly again. However, sometimes there
can be a very painful tumultuous week where rankings come and go and may change
depending on which data center you are seeing your Google results. We have one
client right now for whom we successfully removed their sitewide penalty a few
days ago. Within two days, we could see them ranking #1 for their URL, but brand
terms were nowhere to be seen. However, the client could not see the #1 URL
ranking. (And no, personalized search was not an issue.) The following day, the
rankings were gone on our searches in the morning and then we could see the URL
and brand terms raking again by the afternoon. Those rankings are still visible
to us. But, the changes took a few extra days to be visible to our client who is
in a different hemisphere and is likely seeing results from a different Google
data center. If you have received notice that your sitewide penalty has been
revoked, then please know that it can take a week (or possibly longer) for the
Google results to fully show that your site is no longer being penalized.


On a similar note, in regards to both sitewide and partial actions, if you
have received a message saying that your penalty has been revoked, but your
manual spam actions tool is still showing a penalty, don't worry, it will lift.
It can sometimes take up to a week for the manual spam actions tool to show "no
manual actions".

3. Penguin recovery

There are not many published cases of Penguin recovery. Escaping Penguin is
certainly possibleâwe have seen it! But, it is not easy. The work that
needs to be done is very similar to what needs to be done to recover from a
manual unnatural links penalty. Start with identifying the links that were made
with the intentions of manipulating the search engine results. Then, disavow
those links. It is debatable whether or not you need to remove links in order to
escape Penguin or whether disavowing is enough. If you control the source of the
links and can easily remove them, then definitely remove them. But, contacting
site owners and keeping a record of your work will not likely make a difference
for an algorithmic issue like Penguin, as no webspam team member is going to be
checking your work. Some would argue that it is good to do so in case you ever
do get manually reviewed, but my personal recommendation at this time is to
remove unnatural links that you control, and then disavow the rest. Make sure
you disavow them on the domain level.


It's also important to note that Penguin is not completely about links. You
will also want to clean up on site issues such as keyword stuffing as well.


To escape Penguin, you will need to wait until Google refreshes the Penguin
algorithm. And, in some cases, you might even need to wait for two refreshes. In
this webmaster central hangout, at the 38 minute mark, John Mueller explains
that in order to completely recover from Penguin, the links in your disavow file
have to all be recrawled and the algorithm has to refresh, and in some cases
that whole process can take six to 12 months to be fully completed. Penguin does
not refresh on a regular basis; it can sometimes be six months in between
refreshes. The last announced refresh was October 4, 2013. (Some believe that
there are occasionally unannounced refreshes, but I'm not sure if I agree.)


So, let's assume that you have done a thorough backlink audit, removed links
where possible, disavowed the vast majority of your unnatural links, cleaned up
any spammy on-site issues, and Penguin has refreshed. Now what? Will you see an
increase in traffic?


The answer to this depends on what remains once you have done the cleanup.


If you have very few truly natural links, then you likely will not see much
improvement once Penguin refreshes. Here is the analytics data from a site that
was affected by the initial rollout of Penguin. The site owner did a thorough
link cleanup and disavow, but unfortunately did not see any improvement when
Penguin refreshed.





The reason for this is most likely that the site was only ranking previously
because of the power of unnatural links. In order to see improvement, they are
going to have to be able to attract some good links and in some niches that is
no easy feat. Gone are the days where a small site can outrank the big brands
simply because an SEO was able to build thousands of keyword anchored links. In
order to rank well these days you truly need to have an exceptional site that
can rank on its own merit and not only because of SEO tricks. A good SEO will
work on ways to improve the entire user experience and promote the site properly
so that it can gain natural links and not just focus on a "quantity" over
"quality" type of linkbuilding campaign.


If you do have a site with a good base of links beneath the unnatural ones,
then it is possible to see some improvement once Penguin refreshes. The Penguin
algorithm is Google's way of saying, "We don't trust this site because they have
a history of cheating to get good rankings in the past." If the Penguin
algorithm is viewing your site unfavorably, then even your good links do not
help you much. But, if you can clean up the signals that caused Penguin to
dislike you, then, when Penguin refreshes, your good links regain their power.
Here is a site that had a decent base of links underneath a large number of
unnatural links. They were hit by Penguin on April 24, 2012. They eventually did
a thorough cleanup, and on October 4, 2013, it appears that they escaped the
algorithm:





In my experience, when a site recovers from Penguin, this type of pattern is
usually what we see. It makes sense that the site would not bounce back to its
original rankings as some of those rankings were propped up by links that are
now recognized as unnatural. It looks like this site was able to attract some
new links but those links had only a small effect until Penguin refreshed and
recognized that the site had now reformed. Now, as this site gains new natural
links, it should continue to improve.


Here is another site that worked extremely hard to clean things up, and was
rewarded on the October 4, 2013 Penguin refresh. This site has an excellent base
of natural links and continues to gain links on a regular basis. They made the
mistake of buying links in the past and those purchased links along with some
low quality directory and bookmark links caused the Penguin algorithm to put the
site in a bad light. Doing a thorough cleanup of the unnatural links allowed the
site to escape Penguin. And now, their new links that have accumulated since
April of 2012 are able to really help the site.





Full Penguin recoveries like this are not common. You will read many articles
of people telling you what you need to do to recover, but I believe that there
are few SEOs out there who are consistently recovering Penguin-hit sites. In my
experience, unless you have a good site that can attract links on its own,
recovery from Penguin is going to be difficult.


As a side note, we have seen sites recover when Penguin refreshed two weeks
after filing a disavow, so it doesn't always have to take as long as six months
to a year to see improvement. But, if you have a good site with good links and
you have done a thorough cleanup, but you are still seeing dismal rankings,
unfortunately you may need to be patient and ride through a couple of Penguin
refreshes before you can tell if things are going to improve. I really wish that
Google would allow site owners have some sort of indication as to whether or not
their site is currently being devalued by Penguin. I can understand that one of
the reasons that they don't do this is because this would help spammers to
determine what is and isn't effective. But, it is extremely frustrating for site
owners whose livelihood depends on business coming from their website and don't
know whether they need to do more clean up or not.

A few added thoughts

Many people believe that once a site has been penalized, it will always be
penalized in Google's eyes. According to John Mueller of Google, this is not
true. In this hangout, John says, "If you've had a manual action on your website
and that's been revoked, then essentially there's no bad history attached to
your site. It's not harder to rank anymoreâ.It's not the case that there
is any kind of a grudge that our algorithms would hold against a site that has
had a manual action."


You may have noticed that I have not shown any examples where rankings dropped
after a penalty was removed. Many people are concerned that filing a disavow
file will cause your site to drop even lower in rankings. The truth is that any
link that is worthy of being disavowed has likely already been discounted by
Google. We have yet to see a site that had its ranking decrease after filing a
disavow file. In theory, this is possible, if you are disavowing truly natural
links. But, even when we have sites where we have had to disavow a large number
of links from authoritative sites (because of things like wide-scale
keyword-anchored guest posting or paid infographic placement), rankings did not
decrease.


Hopefully this article has helped to explain what you can expect once your
link-based penalty has been removed. It's rarely an easy process to recover from
a manual or algorithmic devaluing, but it certainly can be done.


I should also note that the scenarios described above depict my experiences
over the last couple of years of doing penalty removal work. It is certainly
possible that other outcomes can happen. If you have seen something different,
please do leave a comment!


Have a question? Leave a comment and I am happy to see if I can help.
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