How long will the Google penalties last?

[Harpy]

I'm talking about the penalties Andrew mentioned in his "A good PageRank used to mean something" article. Some say you're not going to regain your PageRank back unless you remove the paid links. Others say it's going to take a good while no matter what.

Help?

[Andrew]

Since the Google slap I monitored some websites that got the penalty and about 2 out of 3 regained their PageRank very shortly. It's true that they removed the links.

I'm pretty sure this is like the slap you get when you link to a nasty website. It's going to be forgotten in a few months and PageRank will be back up, but if you repeat it a few times, you may find yourself with a low PR permanently. However nothing is really permanent, we might even see the public PageRank being dropped soon.

[Harpy]

Yea, I guess I'll have to wait and see. At least my traffic is going up