Comments on: A Successful Google Penguin Recovery Story

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:35:37 +0000

Nice story but I question the legitimacy of it. I’ve never heard of Google sending a message on their own accord saying a manual link penalty had been removed (not without another reconsideration request being filed). Can you upload a few screenshots of these messages???

By: Barrie Smith

Barrie Smith — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:35:49 +0000

Hi Lauren TB,

On the 17th the site received the manual link warning message and in addition, suffered an algorithmic (Penguin) penalty close after.

We know there was a Penguin penalty working in conjunction with the manual one, because a manual penalty runs on a cycle of a set number of days (30, 60 or 90) and between those times when the penalty was temporarily lifted (only for a few hours) rankings did not return to their original positions. Therefore, they were demoted in the algorithm by another penalty in place in addition to the brand being penalised manually.

Traffic and rankings returned to above 100% once we had revoked the manual penalty, and removed/disavowed a large enough number of “bad” links.

Regards,

Barrie

By: LaurentB

LaurentB — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:54:52 +0000

Can’t be Penguin. You write the 17th, and the update was launched on the 24th.
Furthermore, one can’t recover from such filter.
Give more details (URL, stats, keywords, etc.), and maybe your story would be worth the read.