Google Penalty or Not?
-
One of my sites I work with got this message:
http://www.mysite: Unnatural inbound linksJune 27, 2013
Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to mysite.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.
But, when I got to manual actions it says:
Manual Actions
No manual webspam actions found.
-- So which is it??? I have been doing link removal, but now I am confused if I need to do a reconsideration request or not.
-
just something to note for others and for future, you get the notice IN JUNE 2013, and you are posting here asking about in almost in September... this can generally cause mayhem and result in what has happened, a lost message. Gotta be on toppa the game man, notice, next day or same night better get into it!
-
I guess that could make sense. Google has really done a poor job with all these penalties and not telling webmasters what is going on.
A check of the rankings on this site do not look any better than the month before. They are still much worse than they used to be.
-
Hey Dave,
I just found this tool from Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration. Try that.
Edit: Ok, so I just tried the tool and it just took me to the manual actions section of webmaster tools. I did a little more searching and I don't see any other way at this point to do a reconsideration request. Unless someone else out there knows of another way, I'd have to change my previous answer and say that you don't have a manual action any more.
You said you've been removing bad links. Perhaps when Google redesigned the manual action notification system they re-reviewed sites and yours no longer qualified for a manual action so they lifted it.
Have you noticed anything in your rankings?
-
I am not sure if I can. When I click on reconsideration request it takes me to the manual spam action page, and then says no action taken.
-
Oh they suck.
But they have been getting better every week since, just not back to where they were.
-
Well, how are your rankings doin?
-
It's possible that the new message system in Google Webmaster Tools may only display new messages. Since your original message came before the Manual Action section was setup, it may not be listed. I'd still do the reconsideration request because it will answer your question. If there isn't any manual action, they will tell you that. If there is, then you may get it removed.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com
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
-
Title page google serp
Why does Google change the titles automatically? I have <title>Canyoning Açores - São Jorge | Discover Experience Açores</title> but google show Discover Experience Açores: Canyoning Açores - São Jorge
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tiagoarruda0 -
Google Indexing Stopped
Hello Team, A month ago, Google was indexing more than 2,35,000 pages, now has reduced to 11K. I have cross-checked almost everything including content, backlinks and schemas. Everything is looking fine, except the server response time, being a heavy website, or may be due to server issues, the website has an average loading time of 4 secs. Also, I would like to mention that I have been using same server since I have started working on the website, and as said above a month ago the indexing rate was more than 2.3 M, now reduced to 11K. nothing changed. As I have tried my level best on doing research for the same, so please if you had any such experiences, do share your valuable solutions to this problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffreyjohnson0 -
Google Update
My rank has dropped quite a lot this past week and I can see from the Moz tools that there is an unconfirmed Google update responsible. Is there any information from Moz on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Website dropped out from Google index
Howdy, fellow mozzers. I got approached by my friend - their website is https://www.hauteheadquarters.com She is saying that they dropped from google index over night - and, as you can see if you google their name, website url or even site: , most of the pages are not indexed. Home page is nowhere to be found - that's for sure. I know that they were indexed before. Google webmaster tools don't have any manual actions (at least yet). No sudden changes in content or backlink profile. robots.txt has some weird rule - disallow everything for EtaoSpider. I don't know if google would listen to that - robots checker in GWT says it's all good. Any ideas why that happen? Any ideas what I should check? P.S. Just noticed in GWT there was a huge drop in indexed pages within first week of August. Still no idea why though. P.P.S. Just noticed that there is noindex x-robots-tag in headers... Anyone knows where this can be set?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Google images
Hi, I am working on a website with a large number (millions) of images. For the last five months Ihave been trying to get Google Images to crawl and index these images (example page: http://bit.ly/1ePQvyd). I believe I have followed best practice in the design of the page, naming of images etc. Whilst crawlng and indexing of the pages is going reasonably well with the standard crawler, the image bot has only crawled about half a million images and indexed only about 40,000. Can anyone suggest what I could do to increase this number 100 fold? Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTay0 -
Google Not Displaying Rich Snippets
We implemented rich snippets for products some time ago. When viewing our site through a site:xxxx.com on Google, they don't show for every product, despite the fact that they should. I've taken some of the URLs that don't show rich snippets in the SERPs, ran them through Google's testing tool, and they display fine. Not sure what's going wrong here. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Since when did Google get case sensitive?
We are currently ranked #2 locally (NJ) for "IT support", and #27 for "it support". This is a fairly recent development - like today. I know "it" is a stop word, but I have never seen this before. The funny thing is that this is the only "IT" search where this happens. Most of my keywords contain "IT". What's up with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Penguin or paid link penalty, or both?
Hello, I have a site, macpokeronline.com, that has seen dramatic decrease in visitors in the last few months, it has went down from 800 per day to 200 per day. It is a pretty complex situation. The site owner purchased paid links from reputable mac sites for years (they were more of followed advertisements, but were only there for SEO Purposes), now that i'm going through the link profligate ins OSE, I can see that a majority of their links come from these sites. There is also a branding issue, there are almost 15,000 links with the anchor text of "macpokeronline.com" These are obviously branded links, I don't know the best way to deal with them (though the majority are coming from the paid link sites) We have just sent the request in to remove the paid links from the sites, and i'm guessing since he is paying over $1000 a month for the links, they will be removed quickly. The site has been receiving significantly less traffic since penguin (apr 24-25) We received a message on July 19th which was the generic unnatural link warning, saying that once we remove links make a reconsideration request. Then on July 23rd, we received another message that says they are taking a "very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole" which I have never seen before. This damage was done before I was hired by this client, I just want to get his traffic back up so I can help him even further, I want to know more about the steps I should take. 1. I will definitely remove the paid ads What else should I do, thanks Zach
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BestOdds0