What is the Timeline For Google Penalty Recovery?

Average Google Penalty Recovery Timeline

"As already said, irrespective of what triggered the penalty, it's easy to diagnose it and then fix it. Good news is that, in most cases, you can get almost all of your search traffic back in the short-term."

Why Google Penalty Happens?

Following are the most common reasons that cause Google Penalty:

• Unnatural links to your site
• Unnatural links from your site
• Hacked site
• Thin content with little or no added value
• Pure spam
• User-generated spam
• Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects
• Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
• Spammy freehosts
• Spammy structured markup

Factors That Impact Penalty Recovery Process

Depending on the kind of penalty and the cause, it can take as little as a week to have the penalty removed and get traffic restored. The time it takes to recover from a Google penalty depends on several factors:

• The type of penalty (Panda, Penguin, Manual Action, Malware)
• Severity of the problem (Minor Ranking Drop, Not Ranking At All, De-Indexed)
• How quickly you can identify the issue(s) with your site
• How fast you can resolve the issues surrounding your site.
• Duration of the reconsideration request (Conditional. Not required in all cases)

Type of the penalty also impacts the time taken for penalty recovery. For example, in some cases, Panda penalties revoked quickly than Penguin penalties, and vice-versa.

Type Of Google Penalties

Which Google Penalty has been imposed on your website and at what extent, is very significant to the penalty recovery process.For example, in some cases, Panda penalties revoked quickly than Penguin penalties, and vice-versa. Which Google Penalty is affecting your website is also a detrimental factor for penalty recovery. Once you are able to determine the signs of possible penalty, you can accelerate the recovery process.

1.Manual Google Penalties:

These are physical penalties leveled by an actual member of Google’s webspam team. They are the quality raters who flag off the site as potential guideline violators. If they find anything in direct violation of the guidelines, they can give you a penalty.

2. Algorithmic Google Penalties:

These penalties are not leveled by quality raters but by Google algorithms itself. Google creates different algorithms to detect spam and other link spam violations. If you think you have a penalty but don't have a manual action message in Search Console, it's an algorithmic penalty.

More the time you take to identify the nature of penalty, more the time it takes to execute a recovery process. You, therefore, should be able to differentiate the signs of penalties.

Signs Of Panda Penalty:

• Gradual traffic decline that eventually stabilizes
• Pages have difficulty ranking no matter how many back links you have
• Your site might be found on page 2 or 3 for many terms
• After certain Google updates, your rankings drop further

Signs Of Penguin Penalty:

• Sharp ranking drop for specific keywords, or group of keywords.
• The page containing the keyword might be de-indexed while the rest of the site is indexed.
• You search console may or may not have a message concerning unnatural linking.
• Instead of home or services pages, lesser important pages are showing up for the penalized terms

Type of the penalty also impacts the time taken for penalty recovery. For example, in some cases, Panda penalties revoked quickly than Penguin penalties, and vice-versa.

Penguin Penalty Recovery Process Timeline:

Generally, agencies go ahead with the following process for Penguin Penalty Recovery-

• Review of entire link profile, both by hand and using a machine learning filter
• Looking for known link networks, schemes, paid links, and other spam sources
• Removal request from each these sites
• Keep detailed records of these requests
• If necessary, prepare a ‘disavow’ report, telling Google to ignore links that can’t be removed
• Writing and submission of necessary reconsideration requests

Panda Penalty Recovery Process Timeline:

Generally, agencies go ahead with the following process for Penguin Penalty Recovery-

• Removal of any thin or duplicate content
• Rewrite and revamp critical pages
• Fixing Server Response Time & Page Load Time
• Fixing bad user experience
• Removal or exclusion of ‘thin,’ low-quality pages