Recovered from Manual Penalty but rankings still suck

[PeteC12]

Hi All,

We got a penalty Last March 2014 ( Side Wide Link - unnatural links) which we recovered from quickly and this changed to Partial Match penalty (impact links)

which we recovered from back in December 2014. Our Site profile has been cleaned up but our rankings

still suck for some of our main keywords (+500) . Also our traffic and local rankings still suck in some cases. From an SEO point of view our site is pretty good,  we've done everything google has recommended including schema.org, mobile responsive, unique content (which we write regulary) and we only have a few duplicate pages. Our domain

authority is better than our competitors but yet our rankings and traffic are still no way as good as theirs.

Do anyone know if recovering from an impact links penalty take longer than 4 months . I know that google says than it discounts those links but I get the feeling google may be looking at an old dataset due to not rerunning panda & penguin since our penalty was removed and this may be whats affecting things.

Does anyone have any ideas?

I am more than happy to post my url if someone fancies taking a quick look ? to see if it's anything obvious ?

thanks

Pete

[PeteC12]

Many thanks Patrick. I will take a look at those posts you suggest

Peter

[PeteC12]

Many thanks for you help and answer.

Our SEO agency has said our Site Profile is pretty clean now with most of our links being branded terms etc.

Our Domain Authority is only 27 , It was once as high as 30 and has been as low as 25 so we are

recovering slowly from that.

We will keep writing fresh content etc and hopefully when Penguin etc refreshes we will see an uplift.

Many thanks for your help.  I will take a look at the post you suggested

thanks

Peter

[PeteC12]

Hi ,

Sorry for the late response, I've been away for the last couple of weeks.

Originally my rankings dropped like 80% , then when the side wide penalty was recovered, It improved by 50% of that drop.

When the Impact links penalty recovered, I was still ranking approx 6th - 10th for many local terms which previously I was ranking top 3.

thanks

Peter

[MarieHaynes]

If you had a manual unnatural links penalty then there's a really high chance that you were also affected by Penguin.  The difference is that Penguin is algorithmic and that you won't see any official notification that you are affected.

The last official Penguin refresh was October 17, 2014.  There may have also been refreshes on November 27 and Dec 5.  If you got your manual penalty lifted in December it means that you will still need to wait for another Penguin refresh to see the full benefit of your cleanup.  For a manual penalty, if the webspam team sees that your bad links are in your disavow file, then that's good.  But, for Penguin, 3 things have to happen to see recovery:

1. You need to do a thorough disavow.

2. You need to wait for Google to recrawl all of the links in your disavow file which can take weeks to months.

3. You need to wait for a Penguin refresh or update to happen.

The other thing that is necessary as well is that you need to have a website that is worthy of ranking.  It goes without saying that if you only ranked previously because of the power of self made links then recovering rankings is not likely.

With all of that said though, I've seen sites that have done good cleanups and seem to have trouble ever ranking again after a manual penalty which is very frustrating.  My last SEW column was on this exact topic:

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2401261/help-my-penalty-was-lifted-but-traffic-has-not-increased

There is still a lot about Penguin that we don't understand.

[Direct_Ram]

out of interest, how far did the ranks drop originally and where are they now (approx)

this sounds like an algorithm penalty which we are also successfully managing a recovery for currently with good results..

check over optimisation and low quality links as apposed to just bad links identified by google.

[EricaMcGillivray]

URLs always help our community come up with more specific answers for your site!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hey Peter

Actually, Alick300 had a great resource for this from Search Engine Journal. You can read that here.

I highly suggest you read this! Hope this helps! Good luck!