So let's say your site was hit by Google Penguin 3.0 almost 18 months ago and you feel you are doomed. John Mueller of Google said yes, while Penguin may have hurt you badly, Google has other algorithms and signals that you can work on to improve your rankings.
He said "luckily we have lots and lots of signals that we use for rankings. So it is not the case that your site is infinitely stuck there until the algorithm updates, there is always room for change."
This is not new, we heard him say this before. The sad part, algorithms like Penguin or Panda are extreme. When you are hit by one and you can be hit by one at different levels, it doesn't necessarily matter how well your title tags are or content is. It can be devastating.
Here is what John said in the Google Hangout this morning on Google+. At the 10:05 mark into the video:
Question:
If a website was hit by Penguin 2.1 is it possible that it's rankings could have remained affected all this time and that they could be restored by Penguin 4.0?
Answer:
Yes, I guess to some extent, if your site is affected by one algorithm and that algorithm has not updated that part of your rankings will probably remain the same. But luckily we have lots and lots of signals that we use for rankings. So it is not the case that your site is infinitely stuck there until the algorithm updates, there is always room for change. Even if this algorithm says this thing, lots of signals might say well actually it is a lot better than you think and then we’d rank that appropriately. So it is not the case that you are locked in until things change on our side.
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at Google+.
