Well, not instantaneously anyway. We’ve seen it a lot over the past year where people claim their website suddenly drops for all it’s rankings. Its traffic subsequently follows. So what is it in the first place that causes their sites to drop?

Usually it’s some form of manual action that Google applies to the website due to it violating one of Google’s stringent and vague Webmaster Guidelines. The usual line is that their links weren’t completely in line with Google’s rules, sorry, guidelines, and that they clean them all up, submit a resubmission request and huzzah! No more manual action.

They give it a week and see no return to their previous levels of traffic and rankings. So what’s the problem? Well, it just seems that although your penalty has been lifted, it’s more of a “we wont punish you further” rather than “we’ll fix your rankings”.

After all, would you learn your lesson if you could break the guidelines, rank well, get found out, have a manual action penalty, get within the guidelines again, and be restored? It’d be open season for trying out black hat results if you knew you could try anything with impunity knowing you could remove it and simply be restored to where you were.

So what are your thoughts on this? Do you think traffic and rankings should be restored straight away?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey