How long does penalty last?

Death sentence or 10 to life?

[oaktown]

I've seen a couple of sites that appear to be banned from passing PR. It looks, judging by the site-owner's posts, as though they intend to mend their ways and clean up their act. (we'll see). For all I know, maybe they're hiring Johnny Cochrane.

I am wondering if they are going to be re-instated (if so, after how long?) or if this is permanent. Any ideas?

[candidboy]

Sites do come back to google after being banned. It takes time, depending on the type of spamming they did. My experience shows a site using hidden text comes back in google in 3 months time (after cleaning up there act.

Also it is good idea to mail google, apologizing for the mistake and requesting re-inclusion.

Believe me it works :)

[MikeBeverley]

I think you're getting confused, Yahoo is the one who imposes manual penalties that you need to contact them to have removed.
Google simply increase their spam filtering capabilities. They don't (unless absolutely necessary like SearchK**g) manually penalise sites. Therefore your timescale of three months would be about right. Not because a Google engineer looks at it and says 'Well that looks better' but because in month one Googlebot spots that it is no longer using spam, month two the nonspam page is placed in the index and in month three the index reshuffles allowing the new non-spam page to be listed in results.

This timescale is for a very low traffic site that does not get crawled very often. A high traffic site can expect their pages to lose their 'penalty' within weeks, not months, due to the quicker crawling and indexing/freshening they get.

[sem4u]

They don't (unless absolutely necessary like SearchK**g) manually penalise sites

Untrue. I have seen many hand removals of sites.

[MikeBeverley]

I have seen many hand removals of sites

What, you actually saw them do it? Great! You'll make a lot of cash from all the court cases going on just now if you testify for the defense!

[sem4u]

I think you know what I mean.... They definitely were not algo changes.

[mfishy]

<<They don't (unless absolutely necessary like SearchK**g) manually penalise sites. >>

Not true. Although G is more likely to use their algo to fight "spam", they certainly manually ban sites quite a bit. Actually, they have been quite aggressive at manually eliminating PR sellers ability to pass PR for some time now.

[netguy]

Google can certainly manually punish sites found to be in violation of their TOS - although it must be egregious, as it happens very seldom.

>I am wondering if they are going to be re-instated (if so, after how long?) or if this is permanent.

Back on point, there was a discussion with GoogleGuy early last year where a site had hidden text and was penalized. When the guy realized his 'mistake,' he cleaned everything up and submitted a reinclusion email to Google.

As I recall his (and most) were being reinstated in 30-60 days from when the infraction was fixed and G notified.

I suspect it would be a little longer these days, but they have been fairly good at 'righting webmaster's wrongs.' (At least what Google considers wrong).

Steve

[More Traffic Please]

Back on point, there was a discussion with GoogleGuy early last year where a site had hidden text and was penalized. When the guy realized his 'mistake,' he cleaned everything up and submitted a reinclusion email to Google.

As I recall his (and most) were being reinstated in 30-60 days from when the infraction was fixed and G notified.

Well here is an interesting experience I had. For months I used the spam report to let Google know about a site that had over 20 links the same color as the background in a very basic web ring scheme. Nothing ever happened. After mentioning it in a post here, GoogleGuy droped me a sticky and asked for the URL. He took a look and agreed it was clearly against Googles TOS and said he would pass it along to the right people. Within an hour, the site was gone. A check of site:example.com KW1 KW2 showed nothing. This site has ranked #1 for years for it's KW phrase and now it was nowhere. About 3-4 months later, I checked the KW phrase and was surprised to see it back at #1. When I looked at the site, nothing had changed. All the hidden links are still there but the site is back ranking #1 again. Maybe there is a difference between the penalty procedures between an algo triggered penalty and a hand check. I just don't understand why Google's filters have such a hard time with picking up white links when the entire background of the page is also white.

[seomike2003]

css dude

[More Traffic Please]

css dude

Not in this case.

[BigDave]

The fact that css exists is why it is hard to detect hidden text. It might appear to be the same color as the background, but could be changed to another color with css.

A page actually has to be rendered to find out if something is hidden. And that takes a lot of processor time.