Penalty recovery for 3 days each month?

[malinkam]

I've noticed this in our logs that for last 2 months.

Around 18th through 20th, google would give our site a 50 % recovery for 3 days.

Everything goes back to "normal" after 3 days (normal meaning loss of traffic).

Is this the so called yo yo effect?

[tedster]

It sure sounds like some breed of the yo-yo - although I've never run into the 3-days a month species before.

Using the yo-yo mechanism to gradually release a url from a penalty sounds like a step Google might take. They could gather some good data about the url's performance at a higher position that might be useful for them.

[malinkam]

thank you Tedster,

release a url from a penalty

forgot to mention one more interesting issue. During those 3 days new urls rank very well, pages that never ranked well to begin with, this is not "releasing" old urls issue.

[newbieatseo]

My main site has been affected by this since the middle of Jan.

I have the same rankings I've had for ages for only 3-4 days at a time then drop out for a week or more only to recover for 3-4 days again.

It's an old site that's been around since 2001. Haven't made any changes that would cause this to happen.