Google Disavow and Penalty lifted please help?
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We disavowed 80% of our backlink profile due to our last SEO building cheap nasty links and filed a reconsideration requested (we had the Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.xxx.co.uk penalty for a year from the 24<sup>th</sup> march 2012 but thought it best to clean up before round 2 – even though we had no real penalty and we dd some decent link building that moved us up).
We then received a successful penalty lifted note (on the 22<sup>nd</sup> of May 2013) but our rankings dropped (due to the crap links propping us up) since then we have built a fair few high quality links but our rankings do not seem to be moving much if at all (7 weeks clear now).
has anyone had any experience with the above (are we in a sandbox type situation).
Thank you for your time
Thanks Bob
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If you disavowed 80% of your links, and many of them were being counted by Google prior to the penalty, then you should expect your rankings to drop substantially, even after the penalty is removed....because you simply have a fraction of the links you had before. Granted, the ones you disavowed were most likely very weak links, which is good.
But moving forwards, what you've got to do is build new, strong, non-spammy links. And expect this to take some time, too. From when you add a new link, it takes Google a while to discover that, then recalculate the PR that flows to your site from that link. At one point, that link juice recalculation seemed to me to be taking about a month; I suspect it's a little faster now. As well, I'm seeing indications with several clients' sites that there's an artificial delay of 3 to 6 months when major changes happen on a site...then, with no further changes made to the site, the rankings and traffic will inch up over a couple of months.
So my advice: be patient; you need to rebuild the links you've lost (with better quality sources, of course). And if you can create interesting, shareable content, leverage Facebook, G+ etc. to get your site visitors to help you build some of those links (and get real traffic from the shares) in the social sites.
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