How long before your rankings improved after Penguin?
-
Those of you that have algorithmic penalties, how long after making changes did you actually see an improvement, or have you ever?
I have several sites that tanked after Penguin 2.1 and after doing Link Removal, Diasvaow files and building newer more quality links and adding content, I am STILL not seeing any change in rankings after several months.
I have heard from some people it can take up to 6-months for google to even crawl a disavow file. I have also heard no matter what you do it won't matter until Google does another update.
I feel like we have made a lot of changes in the right direction, but I don't want to go overboard if nothing is going to matter until another Google Update is done.
What are your experiences?
-
How would you force google to recrawl them?
-
Dave, it's entirely possible for sites to start ranking again really quickly, within days or weeks. The problem is not that it's taking Google a long time to process the disavow file. The problem lies with the actual links in that disavow file to be recrawled by Google. Since those are low quality links it will take some time (usually) for them to recrawl them. From what I understand, Google has to crawl a URL first and see the link: then they look at the disavow file in order to 'process' that link (to disavow that link).
It's the crawling that it taking time: not the processing of the disavow file.
So, to speed up recovery, you'll need to get those disavowed links crawled again. Or force Google to recrawl them.
-
I think its very unlikely it takes 6 months for a disavow file to be processed - I have heard ranges from a couple of weeks to a couple months but no more.
If your talking about an algorithmic penalty (like penguin) then most likely you should see more gradual changes than if it were a manual penalty (which you would need to get removed via a re-inclusion request to see improvement).
When you mention 'go overboard' then that is a matter for you to decide what is a good and bad link, but in my opinion if you are under any penalty you need to be pretty thorough in removing all links that you think could be causing you issues.
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 much does "Sud-domain SEO optimisation" improves website ranking?
Let's say there is a website(domain) and couple of sub-domains (around 6). If we optimise all sub-domains with "keyword" we want our website to rank for.....like giving "keyword" across all page titles of sub-domains and possible places which looks natural as brand mentions. Will this scenario helps website to rank better for same "keyword"? How can these sub-domains do really influence website in rankings? Like if the sub-domains have broken links, will this affect website SEO efforts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Brand queries as a ranking signal?
Hi folks, I may be shooting WAY off the mark here for it to be laughable, but I wondered if anyone else was thinking about this. I was trying to get to sleep last night, but was thinking about rankings (as you do... You DO think about rankings instead of counting sheep don't you... I'm not weird or anything am I... AM I?) and it occurred to me that maybe Google uses frequency of brand queries as a ranking signal - was wondering if anyone had done any research into this? Assuming that if more people are searching for a brand name, then there must be an outside influence on this behaviour (offline ads or editorial for example) - and this all points to a site or company being popular or interesting - maybe Google looks at the growth in brand name queries, and boosts based on this... I have done no research into this (I was just thinking about it instead of counting sheep last night... because I probably AM weird...) but was wondering what people here thought of this. Also, I don't have time (or intelligence TBH) to run an experiment on this, but maybe one of you bright sparks would? Best wishes, Amelia PS - if I'm being STOOPID please be gentle with me 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
How about a discussion on Penguin 2.0?
Penguin 2.0 was officially released today. I'm sure we've all seen Matt's video. http://searchengineland.com/penguin-4-with-penguin-2-0-generation-spam-fighting-is-now-live-160544 Ideas for building sharable, linkable content? New strategies? What to avoid, what not to do, etc? Let's get a discussion going!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe1 -
New site - when will it rank?
We changed our domain 6 weeks ago as we had a penalty we couldn't shake off... My question is: How long will it take to rank for our keywords. I appreciate this is a difficult questions as there are a lot of factors that will effect our ranking. Do Google wait a period of time before allowing a new site to rank well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Competitve keyword ranks on mobile but not on laptop
When i search for a very competitve keyword on a smart phone , my site ranks #6 but on laptop or desktop ranks #24. I do not have a mobile verison of my site just to clarify it. I have cleared the cache on my mobile and laptop. still the same. What is the reason for this?, I d appreciate an insight on this thanks. Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | orion680 -
Rankings dropped - Why?
At the end of November a client site dropped significantly in the rankings. The drop effected almost all the keyphrases we monitor. Historically the homepage has always ranked higher than the sub-pages - however now it seems Google is no longer ranking the home page, and instead ranking the sub-pages, just far far lower down. Any ideas what could cause this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg0 -
Why did my rankings drop?
Hi all, In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links. Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen: 1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see. Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites. 3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too. A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3. I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse. Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net. Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0 -
The ranking power of exact match domains
I've read previous Q&A where people have been a bit dismissive of the ranking significance of exact match domains but my experience recently using the keyword competiveness tool is that exact match domains seem to outrank other sites regardless of domain or page authority or other on-site/on-page optimisation. I'm interested in other people's opinions and experiences.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110