Partial Removal of Manual Google Penalties

[tedster]

This is an interesting bit of information, shared by John Mueller and reported on SERoundtable.

One webmaster received a notification that the inorganic link penalty they received was partially revoked. Google said they were able to "partially revoke a manual action" taken against the site...

Generally speaking, it can take a bit of time for these kinds of changes to bubble up, and to be visible in search results, it would be rare to see a jump right afterwards.

[seroundtable.com...]

[tedster]

"Partial removal" of a manual penalty is interesting to me - but the "bubbling up" comment is even more interesting!

[1script]

I've never received an admission of "partial removal of penalty" but in instances when an extremely harsh penalty had been removed (as a result of an RR but without verbal response), the returning traffic had stopped at almost exactly 1/3rd of the original amount, it happened in a matter of days and no further "bubbling up" had happened, even though I sort of intuitively expected it.

So, yes, I would say a partial recovery is possible but the "bubbling up" concept has more to do with psychology than computer systems. I think it's an indication that noone, including Google's engineers themselves, has a complete picture about the way the system operates.

I believe they do use various "damping factors" for the amount of traffic they "dole out" and once the actual hard penalty is removed and the damping factor has been applied instead, the amount of traffic that the site receives becomes proportional to what it would normally get times the damping factor. Anyhow, a dumping factor would kill off any bubbles, you would only be able to see large changes in rankings. And they can as well be further down, not only up, yet "bubbling down" does not make much sense in the physical world, does it? So, I'd say the whole concept of bubbles here is flawed.

What can perhaps look like a sort of "bubbling up" is the fact that increased Google traffic means that your site is now put in front of more people and therefore off-Google activity also increases. You get more direct links, bookmarks, Facebook likes, Twits and whatever else which indirectly comes as a result of your increased G traffic.