Blacklisted website no longer blacklisted, but will not appear on Google's search engine.

[rodneywarner]

We have a client who before us, had a website that was blacklisted by Google. After we created their new website, we submitted an appeal through Google's Webmaster Tools, and it was approved. One year later, they are still unable to rank for anything on Google.

The keyword we are attempting to rank for on their home page is "Day in the Life Legal Videos" which shouldn't be too difficult to rank for after a year. But their website cannot be found.

What else can we do to repair this previously blacklisted website after we're already been approved by Google?

After doing a link audit, we found only one link with a spam score of 7, but I highly doubt that is what is causing this website to no longer appear on Google.

Here is the website in question: https://www.verdictvideos.com/

[mememax]

first of all let's make a step back.

1. when you got hit by a manual penalty (which I asusme is the case as you filed a reconsideration request in search console), you never recover to 100%. You've made a dirty play, got a yellow card for that and you have it, at least is what I would do in my personal life, so it makes complete sense that google marks people that tried to game their system anytime in their life.

2. page 1 has just 5 free spots as other 5 (from what I see) are youtube/vimeo videos, so it's harder than you may think for getting there. I'm in fact seeing you rank with your https://www.verdictvideos.com/services/day-in-the-life-legal-video/ within the vimeo results, which means you may have done a good job in your multimedia by building sitemaps and sharing them around.

3. your backlink profile is really poor. You just have 4 links pointing to the homepage, and your domain has a trust flow lower than 20. I personally find it low. And speaking about legal stuff I would want to have a trustworthy website being featured at the top. Half of your backlinks are blackfriday stuff built on low quality websites... I don't know if you have removed them or not but they seems to be an huge part of your backlinks, and the other part are highly optimized keyword rich backlinks,

I would try to variate them more and build more relevant links on more autoritative websites which is what you need. Your competitor doensn't seem to have a very solid linkbuilding profile either (<cite class="_Rm">coltoncreative.com</cite>) so with the right links and the good optimization (I haven't checked your onsite SEO) you may achieve good results.

[BCutrer]

So there are two types of penalties, manual ones as you have dealt with and algorithmic ones.  So clearing a manual penalty won't necessarily clear the algorithmic one if there is an issue. If I was going to find a smoking gun it would be links like www.juryverdictalert.com that have what look like a banner ad to the site but haven't put a "no-follow" to the link. It looks spammy to have hundreds of links on low word count pages all point to you from one domain.

The other things. You rank #1 for "Verdict Videos" so that doesn't look like it is algorithmic- it could just be bad targeting. I get that is your title tag, but I didn't see the keywords in anything more than an h3 and I couldn't find a single anchor text backlink that is live (I used Ahrefs). Not that you want to go crazy with that, but you would expect it somewhere.