Two sites with manual link penalty removed - No ranking change

I wish I had some insight...

I think John Mueller said recently that there is no residual "waiting period" for sites to rank again after a penalty is removed.

But then Matt Cutts said that there is a waiting period before google can trust your site again.

So maybe the value of any natural links you have is muted until google is somehow able to "trust" your site again?

Pure Speculation: Maybe after the penalty is lifted, the algo compares your site to the profile of other "trusted" sites for a period of time before link juice from natural links is restored to its full value?

If your site conforms to the profile of other (non-penalized) sites over a period of time, maybe any quality signals (links, citations, user behavior) are given their normal full value?

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While I don't have personal experience with this, some have said that it is far EASIER to recover from a manual penalty than from an algorithm slap.

Is there a chance you have been affected by other algorithms since you received the initial penalty? If you have been hit by Panda (there may be more work to do), if you have been hit by Penguin you may need to wait for the update.

Agree with SnowMan68, if its penguin then it can be a slow process

have a read of this article here, very informative, and has a load of different alternatives

[moz.com ]

Thanks for the replies... Yes penguin is a possibility.. And the Google needing to trust the site again..

I imagine you'll have to earn your rankings back the natural way. You removed all the link spam you created which was giving you your results, now it's gone. It's beyond me why you'd expect to return to previous ranking positions.

@linkbuildr

He said he was hoping to see stuff go back to atleast the 5th page, not #1.

You will definitely need to build natural links over time, but if you haven't seen any movement you have most likely have been affected by another algo during the penalty period. Good chance it's penguin.

My guess is that layered penalties are in play. While the manual action was holding your site back, you probably have other issues. In fact, a number of people who had their manual penalties revoked actually saw declines in their search positions because of all the links they disavowed. If I were you I would have expected some type of movement by now - either up or down. Or maybe Google hit the wrong key on the keyboard and the manual action is still there. You never know!

If its your main site, continue building out the site, and forget about google. Build content that people link and share of facebook. I've run a site for 15 years, never did black hat, never cared about white hat. Just built out pages people wanted to see. And it Ranked very well.

Problem is when you rank well, people use you to steal from....

Just make a site with information and links people would use, google allowed for scrapper sites to copy content, blogger sites to steal content, and so on. Today i still have tons of crappy blogger sites all they have is copied content. Google enables others to steal. And continues to reward them. Found a top 25k site with all stolen images. popunder windows and neverendling landing pages

I was even at an adsense meeting and was told i could use ads for search on a content page, which i didn't.

Bottom line is does your site make google money? I have always enjoyed traffic from google but worked on making a site that makes me money and if google chooses to rank it well good for google, and if you depend on google, you better fix that fast, because one day they will screw something up and you will fall of the cliff.

In the end its called teh world wide web for a reason, I've never seen a spider web with 1 link holding it up.