: Google Manual Penalty has been lifted but rich snippets in the search results are not back to normal We had certain features like breadcrumbs, stars, the knowledge graph etc in the SERP's but

@Sue5673885

To update this post.

SERP features returned after about 2 months apart from the knowledge graph. That still hasn't returned.

Rankings didn't appear to be affected throughout the whole situation.

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@Megan663

Google's John Mueller addresses this in this webmasters office hours video at 8:00 in


It’s almost never going to be that we will just restore the previous state because things evolve on the internet, things evolve in our algorithms and any previous state will be different when we look at it now. So even if nothing happened with your website with our algorithms in the meantime the rest of the web will have evolved, so that previous state might be different from the new state that that will come up.


In the case of a manual penalty, you may have been penalized for something Google didn't like, but which was helping you rank. When you fix your site for Google, it may eliminate that ranking factor.

In short, don't expect your rankings to return after a penalty from Google.

Google only pays attention to microdata markup for sites that it trusts. When your site is penalized, that trust is eroded. Google may choose to never show rich snippets in the search results for your site again.

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