Has anyone had their Google manual spam penalty lifted without notice?
-
In June of this year, our company submitted a reconsideration request, which Google rejected and confirmed that they had a manual spam penalty placed on us. After cleaning up our extensive link portfolio, we submitted our 2nd reconsideration at the end of this month (July) and received this response:
Dear site owner or webmaster of domain,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider domain for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
-
Has anyone else or their clients experienced this recently?
-
Can this be attributed to the "softer" Panda update?
-
Any other additional information is greatly appreciated.
-
-
I agree with Chris. I thought I'd add some personal experience here. I worked on an unnatural links penalty for a site with a horrendous backlink profile. After several weeks of work we filed for reconsideration. Previously every time the site owner applied for reconsideration he had failed. This time we got the same message as you.
At first I felt sick that we had spent so much time (and he had spent so much money) trying to get rid of a penalty that had expired on its own. But, I now know that if the webspam team revisits your site and sees that you have not done the work to clean it up then they will re-penalize you and that often the second penalty is worse than the first.
Also, the backlink cleanup was necessary for Penguin reasons.
-
eugeneku, yes, manual penalties do expire. Per John Mu:
"If your site receives a notification of web-spam or manual action in Webmaster Tools, then that will be due to a web-spam review and manual action that has been taken. While manual actions will expire at some point, I would strongly not recommend sweeping them under the carpet and hoping that they go away on their own -- at least if you're interested in having your site be optimally represented in our search results."
-
Yes this has happened to me but not recently.
Not sure about the rest... sorry I am unable to elaborate.
Google does not communicate well on these issues so it would not surprise me in the least. But I had a domain that was Penguined and is back without any notice... Who knows..
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Fetch as Google temporarily lifting a penalty?
Hi, I was wondering if anyone has seen this behaviour before? I haven't! We have around 20 sites and each one has lost all of its rankings (not in index at all) since the medic update apart from specifying a location on the end of a keyword. I set to work trying to identify a common issue on each site, and began by improving speed issues in insights. On one site I realised that after I had improved the speed score and then clicked "fetch as google" the rankings for that site all returned within seconds. I did the same for a different site and exactly the same result. Cue me jumping around the office in delight! The pressure is off, people's jobs are safe, have a cup of tea and relax. Unfortunately this relief only lasted between 6-12 hours and then the rankings go again. To me it seems like what is happening is that the sites are all suffering from some kind of on page penalty which is lifted until the page can be assessed again and when it is the penalty is reapplied. Not one to give up I set about methodically making changes until I found the issue. So far I have completely rewritten a site, reduced over use of keywords, added over 2000 words to homepage. Clicked fetch as google and the site came back - for 6 hours..... So then I gave the site a completely fresh redesign and again clicked fetch as google, and same result. Since doing all that, I have swapped over to https, 301 redirected etc and now the site is completely gone and won't come back after fetching as google. Uh! So before I dig myself even deeper, has anyone any ideas? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | semcheck11 -
Manual Webspam Error. Same Penalty on all sites on Webmaster Tools account.
My URL is: www.ebuzznet.comToday when i checked webmaster tools under manual spam section. I got Manual spam and reason was Thin content with little or no added value. Then I checked other sites from same webmaster tools account, there are 11 sites, all of them received same manual action. I never received any mail, no notification on site messages section regarding this manual action. I just need confirmation whether it is something to do with any error in webmaster tools or all of the sites really received manual spam actions.Most of the article on sites are above 500 words, quality content (no spun or copied).Looking for suggestions, answers
Technical SEO | | ndroidgalaxy0 -
Title in google organic display
The title (top link) in my organic result in google search has my page title then a dash and another keyword. This keyword is not related to the search result. It may discourage clicks. Where does google get that and how can i change it? For example: Page Title - unrelated keyword
Technical SEO | | bhsiao
url
link description0 -
Google Analytics and Adwords Linkup
I'm in the middle of a log jam with linking google analytics to google adwords. I have a client whose account lists properties for five distinct websites. Company A www.website1.com/
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital
www.website2.com/
www.website3.com/ There are individual adwords accounts for each property that I'm trying to link up. Here's the issue I"m having. I can link up Website1.com Analytics to Website1.com Adwords. Then I'll link up Website2.com Analyitics to Website2.com Adwords. This will cause Website1.com to be linked up to Website2.com's Adwords. How do I fix this?0 -
Google is changing the title
Hi! Lately i have seen that Google changed the page titles for some clients, not all... its about 30% of them. For example, the title looks likes this after the Google change: Company name: SEO and Pay per click management But in on that page it looks like this: SEO and Pay per click management - Company name Does anyone know why?
Technical SEO | | DanielNordahl1 -
Google previews meanings
I have noticed that when I do a site:mysite.com search and all my indexed pages come up, that when I hover over the arrows and bring up the previews some of the pages have things in a red rectangle and some of the pages even have zig zag-like tears/perforations running through them. What do these signify?
Technical SEO | | VictorVC0 -
Dramatic Decrease in Google Organic Traffic Indicates a Penalty But None Found
So we've been having some difficulty with one of our websites since we split it in half and moved one section of content to a new domain with a new name, at the end of May. http://www.dialtosave.co.uk/mobile/ was moved to http://www.somobile.co.uk And in the following 6 weeks, the google organic traffic has fallen to miniscule levels, that seem to indicate a more serious issue than just low ranking. Initially when the site was moved, the 301s transferred the authority very quickly and the new website pages ranked well. Now, some of them simply won't rank at all unless you include the name of the website "somobile". Here is one of the current rankings that indicates an issue:
Technical SEO | | purpleindigo
"somobile" - 1
"somobile mobile phones" - not in top 50 These are some of the terms we used to rank in the top 10 on Google UK, and still do on Bing UK, but don't rank in the top 50 on Google UK now:
samsung galaxy ace
apple iphone 5 deals
samsung tocco icon Our webmaster central account says that only 30% of the pages in our sitemap are in the index. It seems like a penalty has been imposed, but our reconsideration request (just submitted because it seemed like a sensible next step) came back saying there were no manual actions taken. Can you see what it is that might be causing the problem for us? I would have thought it was the new domain (with less direct links and less brand credibility), or content issues, but I would have thought that would just reduce the ranking by a few pages rather than just hide the pages altogether.0 -
.co what is it? Do I need it? Does Google hate it?
Do .com rank better then .co? I don't know much about .co so I'm just looking for some insight! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | christinarule0