Recovery playbook

Traffic falls off a cliff. Before anything else, establish which of two things happened, because they share no remedy.

Step one: which is it?

Open Search Console and look. A manual action is listed there with the problem named. Nothing listed means no manual action, which means no reconsideration process exists to use.

Then establish the shape of the drop. A sudden fall on one date suggests an event. A gradual slide suggests reassessment or competitors improving. A drop confined to one section points at that section.

Then rule out the boring causes, which are more common than penalties: a noindex shipped in a release, a robots change, a migration gone wrong, a certificate expiry, a server problem, analytics tracking broken so the traffic is fine and the measurement is not.

That last category accounts for a large share of suspected penalties and takes an hour to exclude.

If it is a manual action

1. Read what it actually says. The scope matters — site-wide or partial, and for what.
2. Inventory honestly. Every campaign, vendor, and domain involved, including from before anyone currently employed was there.
3. Fix the cause. Ending the contract matters more than cleaning the output.
4. Remove what you can. Actual removal beats disavowal.
5. Document everything — what you found, what you did, what you could not do and why.
6. Request reconsideration with that documentation. A vague request fails; reviewers are assessing effort and understanding.
7. Expect iteration. A rejected request usually means something was missed.

If it is algorithmic

No notification, no appeal, no confirmation when fixed. You are diagnosing rather than appealing.

The work is content and quality assessment: which pages lost visibility, what they have in common, whether they are thin, duplicated, out of date or no longer the best answer available. Then improving them, and waiting for reassessment, which happens on its own schedule.

This is slower and less satisfying than a reconsideration process, and it is where most real recovery work happens.

About disavow

Narrower than its reputation. It is intended for the case where you have a manual action for unnatural links and cannot get them removed.

Used speculatively it can remove links that were helping, with no way to tell afterwards. Most sites should never file one. "We disavowed a lot of links and things got worse" is a recognizable story and the mechanism is not mysterious.

If you do: be specific, prefer domain-level entries only where an entire domain is the problem, and keep the file as a record of a decision rather than a dumping ground.

Expectations

Months, not weeks, and not guaranteed to return to the previous level — because the previous level may have depended on whatever was removed.

Which is the argument the procurement section makes in advance: the recovery cost is part of the price of the tactic, and it is paid by you rather than by the vendor who recommended it.