Manual Action found in WMTs, no email, no message in WMTs
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Someone I know said that they were looking though there WMTs and under Manual Actions they found they had a partial penalty. There is no date against it and they never got an email and there are no messages WMTs for it. I haven't personally dealt with a Manual penalty before, but I would have expected there to be a message in WMTs for it ( an email might have been missed because of a spam filter etc). Could it be a very old penalty?
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Haven't heard of penalties with no messages or emails (I'd double check the email settings and spam folders just to be certain).
Definitely seems like an odd situation and a less-than-ideal user situation.
As for the age of the penalty, Google has only been notifying users of "partial" pentalties for a year or so, and each penalty has an expiration date. (the expiration date isn't revealed to the website owner, only Google knows this)
There is a chance if you pose this question on the Google Webmaster Forum, an actual Googler may be able to answer directly.
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Bump?
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Its complex as they launched new cctld version of the site and is possible that it might be the cause of the traffic loss. Just very annoying that there is no way to find out when the manual action was issued.
I have to chase a few red herrings before I get to the bottom of this.
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I have no personal experience with this, but I do know of people who have received penalties without WMT messages. I guess you're best bet would be to go through your web analytics and see where there was a drop. Though, you probably already figured that one out.
Best,
Ruben
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