PENGUIN

What are unnatural links?

"So, if I identify and fix the ‘bad links’ I’ll get my rankings back?"

Yes and no. When Penguin hits your site, you’ll have to remove and disavow links – including some that were helping you rank in your pre-Penguin positions.

While affected by Penguin, you get knocked to the point of near invisibility in the search results. When you recover from Penguin, you "break free" of the penalty, but will not be restored to your original rankings – until you get new, clean, legitimate links to replace the "gamed" ones.

Let’s say you used to rank #2 on your primary keyword. When you escape Penguin, you’ll likely go from nowhere to page 2 or 3 of the search results and have to begin to work your way back up from there. In some cases, we’ve seen clients restored to the first page, but never to the exact ranks they had before taking the hit.

"After I remove the bad links, do I need to submit a reconsideration request?"

If you were hit by Penguin and did not receive a manual action notice from Google in your Google Search Console account you won’t be able to submit a reconsideration request. Google made that option exclusive to sites with manual penalties a while back.

The Penguin filter is automated. You simply (and unfortunately) have to make the changes and fixes needed and see if your attempt to break free was successful once Google has discovered your changes and factored them into how they score your site from a Penguin perspective.

As of September 23rd, 2016, the Penguin algorithm is real-time. That means that you no longer have to wait for Google to refresh Penguin calculations manually. Google says this change will result in Penguin calculations updating "much faster" and "typically taking effect shortly after [they] recrawl and reindex a page."

If you received the manual action notification (which is different than being caught up in the Penguin filter), then you will need to do a reconsideration request. And because those are reviewed by humans and not an algorithm, in most cases you’ll need to get rid of more links than you want to. Links that are helpful to your rankings and not ones the algorithm would identify as unnatural. But since a human would view those links as unnatural they’ll need to be removed to attain Google’s forgiveness.

Whether the hit is algorithmic or manual, identifying which backlinks could be causing issues and removing them (or disavowing them) is the most critical factor in recovering from Penguin.