SEO School: Does Google ever properly forgive a Penalised Site

If you’ve ever been caught out engaging some slightly cheeky SEO practices then, as well as recognising the folly of black hat SEO, you’ll also understand the frustration of incurring a Google penalty. Getting penalised by Google is one of the most annoying things that can happen to a webmaster, mainly because of the hassle it takes to sort it out. However, after you’ve changed everything back, submitted your reconsideration request and waited around for Google to, in their own sweet time, take you off the naughty list, that should be it, right?.. Right!?

Well, the best answer we can give is this, we think so. Google are notoriously tight lipped (even by their standards) when it comes to how they view recently penalised sites. It’s unsurprising really, they are not in the business of making life easy for people that attempt to abuse their system. Many people do find that their ranking is not quite the same, though in most cases this can be explained by either them not quite changing everything that was wrong or suspected algorithmic changes since the penalty was applied.

Considering the widespread nature of Google penalties these days, and the rapidly changing rules it seems kind of illogical and unfair to have any kind of permanent penalties. Our best guess is that, yes, if you really have changed the offending issues then you should get back to normal eventually. One thing to remember though, if you’ve demonstrated shifty tendencies once then you can bet that Google will be looking at your site that little bit more carefully in the future, so from now on, it would be best to keep it strictly white hat.

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