At the recent Google SEO office hours, Google answered a question about how long it would take to recover from algorithmic penalties resulting from content quality issues.
Google’s new office hours format doesn’t allow follow-up questions, resulting in less nuanced answers and less helpful than the old format, which allowed Googlers to ask clear questions.
for example,”algorithm penalty” means that the site has completely disappeared from the search results or simply dropped some rankings.
There is a difference between the two situations.
This is the question asked:
“…if a website is penalized for thin content by an algorithm, how much should the website content be updated before the penalty is lifted?”
There is a lot of information missing in that question.
- Has Google sent a message to publishers that their content will be “algorithmically” punished?
- Does the questioner believe he is being punished and does not really know?
Here is the answer:
“In general, it’s a good idea to clean up any low-quality or spam content you may have created in the past.
For algorithmic actions, it may take several months before the site is re-evaluated and determined to be no longer spammy. ”
It takes months for Google to assess the quality of your site
It is clear that it is important to fix all low quality content as much as possible. However, after it’s done, it may take months before it returns to search results.
John Mueller said something similar in November 2021 about how long it takes for sites that lose rankings to recover.
Mr Mueller said:
“Evaluating the overall quality and relevance of a website is not very easy, and when it comes to general quality, I think it is very difficult.
It takes a lot of time to understand how your website fits in with the rest of the Internet.
…it can take months, six months, or even six months or more to see a significant change in the overall quality of your site.
Because we basically pay attention to how this website fits into the context of the whole web and that takes a lot of time. ”
Similarly, at 5:21 in this Google video, Google employee Aurora Morales mentions what happens to sites that violate Google’s guidelines, such as their thin content policy.
A Google employee advises:
“Sites that do not meet our monetization and organic search guidelines may be removed from our search index and have their ads disabled.”
Read more: Google takes months to assess website quality across the web
Listen to Google SEO office hours here at the 24:24 minute mark.
Featured image from Shutterstock/file404
