How old repaired sites are returned to normal results

Factors, procedures and time for Google to restore a damaged site

[Whitey]

Has anyone observed old sites being returned to normal results after being left out of the index for a long time?

What are the steps that Google sequences and how long does each take?

We have a couple of 3 year old sites that has been tidied up with regards to dupe content issues, over 7-8 weeks ago. The re indexing of one of the sites is very slow, with perhaps only 20% visible on the site:tool, despite some good deep linking.

About 3 days ago we noticed results in the SERPS on very weak and unique keywords returning to top positions for those pages. At the same time no recognition of KW's in the meta titles, internal or inbound links seems to have occurred yet.

What can we expect to see in the future and how long will it take?

[oddsod]

I cured dupes, it took over six months with Goog but back to old rankings. But the crawling is still lethargic months later.

[Variable]

I think it depends drastically depends on the consequences that got your site penalized in the first place.

I used to have a high ranking(PR8) site built in 1997 that placed extremely well(good content, organized topic) until it received dupe content penalties(was unknowingly 302 redirecting all subdomains to www domain). The penalties started at the beginning of 2004. I remedied all problems on the site by the end of 2004 and the site still has not recovered.

I've since moved on, but the lesson learned is invaluable.

[Whitey]

Oddsod - I'm interested in you poor crawling rate as I'm seeing this as one of the main symptoms.

Are all your pages crawled and cached?

Variable - Ouch!

Are you sure you fixed all the dupe issues?

[webmasterworld.com...]

Meta title
Meta descriptions
"/" and redirect "index.htm" etc etc

I can't believe a site can sit in permanent suspense. There must be more things outstanding.

If you've fixed everything maybe you could send a re inclusion request.

[edited by: Whitey at 10:08 pm (utc) on Oct. 17, 2006]

[natural number]

i'm not sure if the /index.html thing is a big deal, i mean google.com/index.html isn't redirected.

[Whitey]

Natural Number It's probably the most critical topic of the last 6 months [webmasterworld.com...] if it creates duplicate content, your site will disappear.

oddsod re crawl rates - Google released a crawl rate control over at Webmastercentral [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...] in the last 24 hours - I'm not sure if this is going to improve caching those indexed pages - I guess we'll have to wait and see.

[edited by: Whitey at 5:51 am (utc) on Oct. 18, 2006]

[CainIV]

i'm not sure if the /index.html thing is a big deal, i mean google.com/index.html isn't redirected.

Google also doesn't, nor takes any care in ranking its own site in it's own search engine.

[Whitey]

We're seeing some movement in the last week on a few results for weak terms in the SERP's. Little change yet to traffic.

We still have major problems getting pages cached below level 2 [ of 4 levels ] , despite good site maps and quality inbound deep links [ .edu ]. I've increased the crawl rate to fast - not sure if that will help.

Results that show No1 on Yahoo , and were previously top 1-5 on Google, are still languishing on page 3-4. I wonder when and if they will return.

Should we play a waiting game for a week or so and see what happens?