For years, Google has been continuously making changes and setting high standards for its search engine results, to enhance user experience. Violating the guidelines of Google can throw any business out of the league, so it’s necessary to remain updated and optimize website as per the Google’s standards. But, do you know that you can violate Google’s guidelines for years, get caught and reverse the penalty within a week?
Last month Google penalized its capital-funded company, Thumbtack for unnatural links. Though, it can be surprising, but what’s more surprising was that, this penalty was reversed within one week.
Many SEO’s and webmasters are still amazed and asking, how it is possible that Thumbtack get a penalty reversed that fast? Many stated that, on an average it takes several weeks to months for reversing Google’s penalty manually. While some suspected that Google may have given special treatment to Thumbtack, since they are funded by Google itself.
In context to this Google’s John Mueller said that there is no special treatment given to large sites, popular sites or sites Google funds. He further commented, “It is not the case that even the web spam team has this kind of background information on what kind of site it is, how big it is, who owns the site, who has invested in the site.”
He said that penalized websites that get manual actions can evolve out really very fast, if they do an excellent job of resolving unnatural links, further submitting a “great” reconsideration request. Talking about the reconsideration request, he commented, “A great reconsideration request is really to the point, where you tell us exactly what you’ve been doing, you give us information showing that you’ve completely cleaned up this issue.”
This shows that despite going against Google’s guidelines for years, if you eliminate unnatural links with necessary steps and fantastic manual actions, the penalty can be reversed in less than a week. As Google says, it doesn’t matter who you are and what you do, just remove all the bad links and submit a detailed reconsideration request, and get free of the penalty quickly.