Rare Penalty Limbo Can Last Several Years

According to Google's John Mueller, a site's algorithm penalty can last several years due to a quirk in the system. It's rare but it's real.

In a recent Office Hours discussion John said...

I've very, very rarely seen ... a site gets stuck in some kind of a weird in-between stage in our systems, in that, at some point our algorithms reviewed the website and found it to be absolutely terrible. And for whatever reason, those part of the algorithms just took a very long time to be updated again. And sometimes that can be several years.

John went on to say the chances of any "random website" having this issue is fairly low and that "nowadays" the "technical things resolve very quickly."

But, if your site was penalized several years ago without recovering because of some "weird thing stuck in the algorithm side," then "that's something where reaching out and seeing if there's something weird is always worthwhile."

Here's John's response starting at the 24:49 mark...

• Actionable Strategy — If you've exhausted all relevant corrective measures and think your site IS actually stuck in penalty limbo, then your next step should be to create a help forum post and then tweet @johnmu, asking him to take a look. He may not reply directly but he will likely alert the webspam team if there really is an issue.