Originally Posted by CYF

It depends on the penalty, really. Google has so many penalties besides just panda/penguin. I've only had one site hit, and it got hit on November 19th.... traffic dropped by half. The Nov 19th update is one of those unnamed updates, but it might or might not be related to Panda since there was a panda update 2 days later.



Recovering from a google penalty can take time. Depending on the penalty, 3 months, 6 months, a year, three years, maybe never. Sometimes you just have to leave that site on the back burner and come back to it in 6 months when it starts to recover. Each penalty is different, and the steps you use to recover depend upon which penalty you received.

In my case, I fixed my problems (overoptimized keywords probably) and my google traffic has been recovering although it's only been 3 months. I'm not back up to where I was, but I don't strictly rely on google, either. I'm 75% back to where I was prior the the hit and I'm confident that within the next couple months I'll be back up to where I was before, if not better.

If you can pinpoint the date your traffic dropped, you can google or use the links someone posted earlier and figure out if it's a panda/penguin hit, or if it's something else. My own case was a little weird, I didn't drop any places on the SERPS and I'm still page one for all those keywords (mostly long tail exgf keywords), but the traffic from google dropped. It took a while to figure out what was going on and how to fix it.

BTW I do personally know a few people that have recovered from panda/penguin, I've seen their results, and I know it's possible.