Do people recover from an unnatural outbound links penalty?

[marketing91]

Dear Friends

I received an unnatural outbound links penalty on 4th of June 2016. I immediately acted on it, and analysed a lot of outbound links and removed most of them. I had to file reconsideration 2 times, but on 26th of June my penalty was revoked.However, traffic drop was even worse 27th June onwards and it is still dropping. Now, i dont know why the traffic is dropping. Any idea how much time it takes to come back from an unnatural outbound link penalty? PHd8BzX.png

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey - it's just so hard to say without a link / some research. Just focus on quality and try to understand where the problems are so you are not SEOing in the dark. You could get an experienced consultant to take a look for a few hours or get a full on SEO audit which again will give you some more intel and a prioritised approach. Certainly though you can likely learn lots from analytics by understanding where there has been a drop in traffic, engagement etc.

Always try to base the work you do on data and analysis where possible so you are not just spinning your wheels!

[marketing91]

Thank you so much. I am doing the same right now. Please let me know whether the thinking is right

1. I had 3 ads on site and i am dividing it all so that the top is not heavy. it wasnt previously heavy too, but i have modified it nonetheless.

2. I am rewriting at least 150 articles out of the 950 articles on site. I think those articles are poor in quality. And they need a boost. I am also tackling duplicate content issues and have removed multiple tags from a single post and kept 1 tag on 1 post limit.

3. If after all this, the site does not come up, then it is a backlinks problem and then i need to dig into ahrefs and check out what to do. But i am hoping to god it recovers after the content modification.

These things might take 2 months but i think they will make a slow but sure difference. My livelihood depends on this blog so the return of traffic is very essential for me.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

The main issue here is that things rarely happen in isolation. Sure, you may have had a penalty for outbound links but if you are selling links or generally looking to manipulating results with the links on the site what else is going on?

You have to step back and look at the site with a quality reviewers perspective:

• Why does the site exist?
• Does it provide value to the intended audience?
• Is it the best answer for a range of targeted queries?
• Is the site an expert resource?
• Is the site an authority on the targeted topic(s)?
• Is the site trustworthy?
• Is the site technically well optimised?
• Does the site have technical or traditional SEO issues?

There are a lot of moving parts here but you need to go back to basics. It's always hard to advise without any direct context (not having seen the site) but the the two elements I would consider would be a qualitative review and a more traditional SEO audit.

This is a great overview of the leaked Google quality guidelines:

https://moz.com/blog/google-search-quality-raters-guidelines

That is probably a good starting place and you can start to ask the big questions rather than look for some single algorithmic answer to why your traffic seems to be going in the wrong direction.

Hope that helps!
Marcus