Link Penalty Removed, Rankings Non-existant

I have an aquaintence that got a manual penalty in WMT. They went through and removed or disavowed, applied for reconsideration and the manual penalty was revoked.

That was in September, and their rankings are still gone. They rank nowhere for the head phrases, but do rank for longtails. Everything I have read says ranking s would slowly come back. But, this site hasnt even budged in months after the successful reconsideration.

Is it possible something is still wrong? They were horribly overoptimized on their anchor text and a look at Majestic Historic shows this, but the fresh index is completely different, where they have no overoptimized anchors.

Any advise on what to do next? They are getting natural links, so they are getting new links all the time, and they have a domain authority over 50.

When a penalty is removed many people expect their website to simply jump back up the ranks, but unfortunately this just isn't the case nowadays.

You'll need to regain Google's trust and this could take weeks, months or years. It's simply a case of writing high quality content, building natural links from trusted sites and providing good user engagement. It's a nightmare, but you've just got to stick it out and hope for the best.

Good luck.

When a penalty is removed many people expect their website to simply jump back up the ranks, but unfortunately this just isn't the case nowadays.

You'll need to regain Google's trust and this could take weeks, months or years.

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Actually, this happened to me. But in my case I haven't disavowed shit, so I guess the power of the links stayed there and after penalty is lifted the blog started receiving the same ammount of traffic the same day, as it was before the penalty.

They are gone for all head phrases. Not on the first 100 pages I can find. This seems more like an issue thatn just a rankings drop.