This topic came up in a June 2017 update discussion, and I want to cut it out and discuss.
Recovering from Panda and/or Penguin for Old Sites.
There's a difference between Panda penalty, which is perceived to be on-page and internal factors.
And Penguin, which is off-page factors such as links - for instance, amount and keywords in external links.
Old domains who have been on the web before 2010 and don't have huge link profiles (below 100,000), I believe , all suffer some form of Penguin penalties - due to some external links having negative link weights.
Some of us did promotions in the past that are now considered to be bad practices and even "spam". Those practices before were OK by search engines of the time: link exchanges, directories, forum posts and on-topic (not spammy) comments come to mind. These crossed from white or gray shades into gray and black for SEs of today.
Due to amount of negative links pointing to your domain, it is entirely possible that you won't be able to "clean yourself up" from Penguin penalties. Even if you think you don't have them. Even when you clean up from Panda - larger , unique content, new images and such. I have seen sites recover from Panda using later and have done a few (more than 100) pages myself. But I only have seen a handful of sites with old domains recover from Penguin who don't do link building - this is due to current auto-generated spam and the mathematics of links.
I'd like to discuss examples of recoveries from Panda and/or Penguin. On both sides - people recovering old domain, and people who changed their domain.
