BizSugar.com › Online Marketing › Who’s to Blame for That SEO Penalty?

The biggest SEO failure is obviously any kind of penalty (either algorithmic or manual). This doesn’t just mean that you SEO program didn’t work, it actually worked against you. When sites are whacked with an SEO penalty it can take months or even years for them to completely recover, depending on the severity of the penalty and how often algorithm refreshes happen. For instance, a site that got hit with an SEO penalty after Penguin 1.1 in May 2012 wouldn’t know if they had done what they needed to recover until the next refresh, which came in October 2012.