When a site is penalized manually, it will not lose its knowledge panel in the Google search results.

When I wrote the story on Thumbtack being penalized by Google with a manual action over links, I took a screenshot of the search results and noticed that they still had their knowledge panel to the right of the search results, despite their website not being found in the search results.

I checked back now, in case that information was pulled from a data center that hadn’t been updated with the penalty yet.  But it appears they have retained their Thumbtack knowledge panel, so the ability to show a knowledge panel for a company is completely separate from whether a site appears in the Google search results or not, even if it is the result of a penalty.

There is not a link to the Thumbtack site from the knowledge panel.  So while they are getting brand exposure, it still does not link easily to the company’s website.  It merely links to the Wikipedia page, links to Google searches for the CEO and founder as well as links to two of their social profiles.

The social media links in the knowledge panel are also separated from the penalty since they continue to be displayed.  However, Thumbtack did not include the structured data on their website to show all of their profiles, so Google is merely pulling those results from outside the Thumbtack website.  There is the possibility a penalty could result in social links being removed if the data was taken via the website’s schema markup.

So if you are a big enough brand to have a knowledge panel and receive a manual penalty by Google, you don’t have to worry about losing that panel in the Google search results.