If you website recently got hit with an algorithmic penalty due to a content quality issue, you might wonder, how long does it take you to recover from something like that?
Recently, Google answered the following question:
“…if a website gets algorithmically penalized for thin content, how much of the website’s content do you have to update before the penalty is lifted?”
Google responded to this question by saying:
“Well, it’s generally a good idea to clean up low quality content or spammy content that you may have created in the past.
For algorithmic actions, it can take us several months to reevaluate your site again to determine that it’s no longer spammy.”
Based on this answer, if you do get hit with a penalty, you should take care to clean up the mess that you got penalized with. It sounds like, even if you successfully deal with what got you in trouble, it could take a number of months for your website, or at least the offending page, to finally go back to normal in the search results.
Back in November of 2021, John Mueller said something similar about how long it takes for a site that lost rankings to bounce back.
Mueller said:
“I think it’s a lot trickier when it comes to things around quality in general where assessing the overall quality and relevance of a website is not very easy.
It takes a lot of time for us to understand how a website fits in with regards to the rest of the Internet.
…And that’s something that can easily take, I don’t know, a couple of months, a half a year, sometimes even longer than a half a year, for us to recognize significant changes in the site’s overall quality.
Because we essentially watch out for …how does this website fit in with the context of the overall web and that just takes a lot of time.”
Source – Search Engine Journal
