Suggestions on Website Recovery

[toddmumford]

Hello Mozzers!

I have been tasked with recovering a site from partial link penalty that was previous brought to my attention for this website www.active8canada.com. Upon reviewing the site backlinks and reporting info in Google webmaster tools, I found there was no penalty showing, could it have expired? We spent the last few months doing link cleanup as we recognize that there was some bad links that needed to be addressed.

We requested removal of all the bad links after spending time categorizing all of them. Targeting commercial anchor text and bringing those numbers back to acceptable levels. Following this we did a disavow of the bad links which could not be removed through requests.

We are actively building out additional content for the website as we recognize that some pages have thin content. We have earned some links as well to show some positive signals during the cleanup but have seen no change for better or worse.

My question is, does anyone else see anything else we could be missing here? Should I revisit links again? Some of the links we disavowed are still showing in our backlink reports, but I cross referenced our disavows with the existing backlink profile to try and get an accurate sense of the remaining links. We never saw a decline in ranks further after the disavow, so I'm lead to believe that the links we removed had little, if any impact.

I am a little hesitant to begin earning new links through content and partnership outreach as I still feel something is off that I can't quite put my finger on. It was previously confirmed that there was a penalty, but without that showing now in Google webmaster tools I'm grasping at any possible angle I may have missed.

If anyone had a couple minutes to spare to shed some light on this situation, it would be greatly appreciated!

[Travis_Bailey]

I checked the link profile in Majestic. It seemed to hug the X axis in a bad way. There were likely precious few links of any value. When the vast majority of links appear to be garbage, you're pretty much back at ground zero. And that's given a clean bill of health.

Best of luck, cleanup can be a thankless job.

[FedeEinhorn]

Is is widely known that manual penalties do expire. If you have fixed the issued, cleaned up the backlink profile + disavowing those that were impossible to remove, then perhaps the penalty just expired and as you are no longer in violation to Google quality guidelines you haven't receive the penalty again.

If on another scenario, the penalty expired and you didn't do the cleanup, then most likely the penalty will be back to bite in the a***.

I always heard that penalties do expire but no one was able to tell how long it took, I think you are the first one that can verify that penalties do expire and don't come back unless you haven't fixed the issue

Anyways, after a penalty is revoked/expired, it will take some time, probably month to see the changes.

From my point of view, you are in the right direction, building content to earn backlinks, that's the way to go.

Hope that helps!