Recovery time for new site replacing spammed WP site?

[JAB Creations]

A new client of mine had a WordPress website that somehow ranked well on Google but had comments on every possible page with spam on every possible page...every page. Naturally they sank to the deep abyss of Google SERPS. I've been working on creating a new website for them and they've been up for a couple weeks now and there won't be any more spam ever. How long will it take for them to recover? Google was quick to spider the new site.

John

[Johan007]

Penalty on one mine lifted within a week after resubmission - but site had taken 4 weeks to recover in the SERPS.

[ChrisWilson]

WP sites are such a target for that stuff. Every WP site I have managed has been hit at some point. Although the time for recovery has varied on each one, they all have recovered.

[netmeg]

How long was it let sit with all that spam?

[JAB Creations]

Netmeg, from what I can tell roughly a year, maybe a little less.

We're not waiting for the site to be fully rebuilt, we launched with a couple of pages and then started adding content back every few days. My goal was to effectively remove the spam ASAP plus I don't use third party anything for clients so WordPress disappeared the moment the DNS changed. Their traffic varies up to 50~70% from low to peak though there is a fairly definitive medium.

As of this morning Google's index now finally lists the newer pages that now exist and about half of the older pages are gone from their index. I've been setting up redirects where I can to handle the 404s for the horrible paths to previous URLs. I'm not expecting a huge boost for my client, probably a modest linear increase in a few weeks I'd imagine. They don't have a terribly large website after all though actionable traffic is still important for them.

John

[netmeg]

They let it sit for a year, they're probably going to need to recover the trust and that won't happen for a while. If it were my site, I'd concentrate on making it extremely user friendly, and driving traffic from other channels (even if I have to pay for it for a while) so I get some happy user engagement type metrics going. That'll help as much or more than anything else.