A question was submitted to the Google+ hangout this morning about a site being penalized by Penguin 3.0 back in 2014 and asking for Google to manually update it so the site can break free of the penalty.
The question was asked at the 25:14 mark:
The store we acquired a few months ago was punished by Penguin in 2014 due to mistakes from the previous owner and we are waiting for an update. Can we get a manual update?
The response was, no:
So we don’t do manual updates for a lot of our algorithms. We essentially wait for the algorithms to get updated, to run automatically. So there is no manual update that is possible in cases like this.If you fixed all the issues, with the next update, then it will probably look a little bit better. I don’t have any timing on these updates.
I wonder if people are buying up Penguin sites that failed now, in anticipation for them to recover soon when the Penguin 4.0 algorithm launches? I mean, I wouldn't do that because it probably won't rank even close to as well as it did pre-Penguin 3.0 but it may rank much better than it did post Penguin 3.0. Not sure if that would be a wise business move.
In any event, Google has no way to help one webmaster out here or there around a Penguin algorithm.
Here is the video:
Forum discussion at Google+.
