If your website has been manually penalized by Google and you get that manual penalty revoked after you file a Google reconsideration request, it will take some time for Google to trust your website again. Your website might start to receive traffic again via the organic search results, but that traffic will NOT suddenly come back.
Once a Google manual penalty is revoked, your website needs to regain trust. And it might be some time before you fully gain the trust that your website once had.
In a recent Google Product Forum message, John Mueller responded to some questions from a website owner. What’s notable is that he said:
So while resolving the manual action is a good way to start, you need to keep in mind that it can possibly take quite some time for our algorithms to regain trust in your site even after that.
This makes sense to me, honestly. By doing something that violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, it’s been my experience that you have to do some pretty severe things (like buying advertorials that violate FTC guidelines) or have a history of doing a lot of spammy bad linking in order to get a manual link penalty from Google.
A Google manual penalty comes in the form of a message or ‘warning’ from Google. You can see these messages and warnings from Google in Google Webmaster Tools. The following is an example of a message that was sent to a website owner (one of my clients).
I won’t go into all the details of how to get that manual penalty removed, but essentially you need to clean up whatever you did to receive the manual penalty. Document everything that you’ve done, and beg, plead, and then beg again for forgiveness from Google. File a Google reconsideration request. If you’ve cleaned up everything and promise not to do it again, then Google will revoke the manual penalty and send you a message that it’s been revoked.
But that’s not where you work stops. In fact, it’s where you work begins. You may see some traffic start to come back to your website, and “some” rankings may come back (but usually not where you were before). Your website needs to regain the trust and authority that the site once had. So, in order to fully recover from a Google manual penalty, you absolutely have to put a great link building and content marketing plan in place in order to regain that trust.
If you don’t regain trust after a Google manual penalty has been revoked, you will not see your traffic and search engine rankings come back.
