Despite Google's claims that as of Penguin 4.0 last fall, they just ignore the bad links, here's concrete evidence to the contrary. This is the traffic from one of my clients' sites. On March 2nd, I submitted a pretty major disavow file to undo some really bad ancient history. And no, they did NOT have a manual penalty showing in Search Console. Google algorithmic penalty recovery
Categories: Technical SEO

Michael Cottam

Michael is an independent SEO consultant, specializing in organic SEO, technical SEO implementation, and Google penalty recovery. Michael lives in Portland, Oregon with his son Ben.


Copyright 2026 OzTech, Inc. All rights reserved.