Official Google statement: manual penalties and your rankings

Online discussion Google's John Mueller explained why a website won't regain its old rankings after a penalty. Even if the penalty is lifted, the website still might have bad rankings. What can you do to make sure that your website is not affected by this?

1. Google will lift a penalty if you take action

If your website has been penalized, Google will remove the penalty if you remove the elements that led to the penalty:

"After re-evaluating [a] site’s backlinks we are able to partially revoke a manual action. There are still inorganic links pointing to your site that we have taken action on. Once you’ve been able to make further progress in getting these links removed, please reply to this email with the details of your clean-up effort."

2. A lifted penalty does not lead to higher rankings

If your website has been penalized by Google, it won't get its old rankings back when the penalty is lifted. According to Google's John Mueller, this has two reasons:

A) The previous high rankings were not justified. The unnatural links do not count anymore. If your website does not have other good links, it won't get high rankings.

B) There are other factors that influence the position of your website. Google uses many different signals to calculate the position of a website. Now that the unnatural ranking boosters don't count anymore, the other signals influence the position of your website:

For more info visit SEO SAILOR

Majestic SEO Updates

Majestic SEO has announced a major upgrade in their update cycle, increasing updating frequency from daily to hourly. Now, their Fresh Index stats show near 200 billion unique URLs.

SEOSAILOR “...the improvements in index size are more than skin deep. Now we have better insight into which URLs are important, we have been able to improve the crawler controller.”

This means improved URL discovery and Flow Metrics data, he wrote. Jones expects the crawler controller improvement will result in an increase of 20-25 percent in the referring domains count.

Of the Fresh Links announcement, Jones wrote, “We not only want to have the largest Link Map on the planet… we also want the fastest and the freshest. We always felt we had, but in terms of absolutely getting the links to you more quickly than anyone else, there was just one milestone we felt the need to overcome.”

The historic index will still update monthly, while the Fresh Index will continue updating approximately hourly, where new data is available. The upgrade has begun in Site Explorer and will become available in other services as they can integrate it.

Majestic SEO first launched their Fresh Index last March to much industry fanfare.