How do some sites recover from a Google penalty faster than others?

by Tom Peary

How do some sites which have had a manual or algorithmic penalty seem to be able to recovery quicker than others?

So about 2 weeks ago there was some twitter activity that serenataflowers.com had been hit by a manual or algorithmic penalty. Even searching their domain or brand brought up no results in the first 5 pages. Ouch!

This of course wasn’t the first time a large well known online florist had been hit by a Google penalty, back in 2013 David Naylor reported inter flora had been whacked by Google and had lost the majority of their organic results.

It’s now the 4th December 2015 and at least for their brand search terms which I have checked serenataflowers.com is back!!!!

Now I have dealt with many manual action penalty recoveries along with Penguin and Panda penalty recoveries but 2 weeks is fast. So unless the SEO company in question knew exactly what they’d done to get the penalty and removed all links in that time and managed to get their reconsideration request processed in less than 2 weeks I think there maybe another contributing factor.

So how does a site recover so quickly from a Google manual action penalty whilst others struggling for months and even years?

• Domain authority
• Trust Rating

All hands on deck to undo the spammy link building in record time

Social media, was Google paying attention to all the twitter chat?

A site that recovers not just its brand searches but primary and secure target keyword phrases in Google in 2 weeks is remarkable. The fastest we’ve done it for any site is 2 weeks but that was for a small partial action not a site wide disaster recovery like what serenataflowers.com are dealing with.

It’s clear to see their SEO bods were on the case immediately as it was reported by Sistrix that they were removing links at an astonishing rate.

This is how you clean up spammy links, 50,000 links removed in 4 days

In my experience of over 30 google penalty recoveries in the last 2 years a site wide manual action is not something to be taken lightly. Even if you do cut away all the dead rot and make your link profile sparkly and clean and the manual action is removed it is usual for the rankings for all keywords to recovery as quickly. I worked on one site that had a site wide manual action penalty and filed the reconsideration request in the same week and was successful and even though some rankings started to reappear shortly after the site overall took about 12 months until it was back where it once was. So 2 weeks something doesn’t add up here.

Could it be something other than a link based penalty?

Yeah sure I guess why not. Maybe the site had some malicious code injected which caused another type of penalty, or maybe it was outbound links that were the issue.

But all signs point to a link based penalty for serenataflowers.com

But because we know they started to clean up their back links in such a hurry it was more than likely a link based manual action as you generally don’t started dropping 50,000 links unless you are sure that is the issue.

What does Serenataflowers.com link profile look like today?

Interestingly the number of referring pages pointing to serenataflowers.com has dropped in the last 30 days but the number of referring domains has increased. WTF?!

How did serenataflowers clean up their links so fast to remove a manual action penalty?

I haven’t looked in to this in any further detail yet, because frankly i have a life but i would bet they either participated in a PBN, Sape link scheme or owed/controlled a lot of websites which they had access to site wide links.

Getting links removed is a tiresome job and it doesn’t matter how many emails you send getting links removed isn’t an overnight job. This is why I would guess good money they owned these sites linking back to serenataflowers.com

But why has the number of referring domains increased so much?

It’s a good question really, normally once you get a penalty of this magnitude the last thing you would do is build even more links. Although we have tested this theory once before and we did revoke a manual action penalty albeit a partial one just by adding more links and diluting the number of less organic non-branded, naked url anchor links. So it can work but doesn’t necessarily mean you should do this.

Summary of Serenataflowers manual action recovery

Their team responsible for their SEO or manual action recovery were on the case immediately and began removing links, we can see evidence of that. But to have a full recovery in under 2 weeks is something else. So was Google taking a special note of their website and efforts on Twitter? Who knows for sure.

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