In the Friday Google webmaster hangout on Google+ John once again addressed Thumbtack quick reversal of the manual action and added that it is often the case that many large and big brands do have manual action issues as well as algorithmic issues they have to deal with for a long time.

But beyond that, John Mueller from Google said that it isn’t uncommon for a site to play games for years and then it finally come back to bite them years later and they have to fix the issues and it isn’t overnight.

John said, “maybe they’ve been building up for years and years and finally it kind of bites them that they’ve been doing things wrong for such a long time.”

I’ve seen this to be the case many times but telling someone that when a competitor has been spamming Google for years and they still rank well is something that is not easy.

The conversation began around 28:39 minutes in, here is the video embed at that time followed by the transcript.

Forum discussion at Google+.