Manual Action found in WMTs, no email, no message in WMTs
-
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?
-
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.
-
Bump?
-
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.
-
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
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
-
Manual action due to hack
We have had some issues with one of our websites getting hacked. The first time it happened, we noticed it the next morning and cleaned it up before Google even realised. However, the same thing happened again over the weekend, and I came into the office to an email from Google: Google has detected that your site has been hacked by a third party who created malicious content on some of your pages. This critical issue utilizes your site’s reputation to show potential visitors unexpected or harmful content on your site or in search results. It also lowers the quality of results for Google Search users. Therefore, we have applied a manual action to your site that will warn users of hacked content when your site appears in search results. To remove this warning, clean up the hacked content, and file a reconsideration request. After we determine that your site no longer has hacked content, we will remove this manual action. _Following are one or more example URLs where we found pages that have been compromised. Review them to gain a better sense of where this hacked content appears. The list is not exhaustive. _ We have again cleaned up the website, however, my problem is that even though we have received this email, I cannot find any evidence of the manual action having actually been applied. I.e. it doesn't show in the Search Console and I am also not getting a warning in the search results when searching for our own website or clicking on the result for our website. That means I cannot submit a reconsideration request - however I am not sure at all there was actually a manual action applied at all based on my test searches. Has anyone here experienced the same issue? What do you suggest doing in this case? Thank you very much in advance for any ideas.
Technical SEO | | ViviCa10 -
Partial manual action - unnatural links from domain takeover
One of our clients took over a competitor and it would appear that all links to that take over website got redirected to our client. This resulted in ~430,000 links to our client in a short time period. This also resulted in a partial manual action against the unnatural links. What would Google be looking for us to solve in this case? Should we change all of the links to "no follow", should we remove them completey?
Technical SEO | | aaronleven0 -
Time to deindexing: WMT Request vs. Server not found
Google indexed some subdomains (13!) that were never supposed to exist, but apparently returned a 200 code when Google somehow crawled them. I can get these subdomains to return a "server not found" error by turning off wildcard subdomains at my DNS. I've been told that these subdomains will be deindexed just from this server not found error. I was going to use Webmaster Tools and verify each domain, but I'm on an economy goDaddy server and apparently subdomains just get forwarded to a directory, so subdomain.domain.com gets redirected to domain.com/subdomain. I'm not even sure with this being the case, if I can get WMT to recognize and remove these subdomains like that. Should I fret about this, or will the "server not found" message get Google to remove these soon enough?
Technical SEO | | erin_soc0 -
Google caching the "cookie law message"
Hello! So i've been looking at the cached text version of our website. (Google Eyes is a great add on for this) One thing I've noticed is that, Google caches our EU Cookie Law message. The message appears on the top of the page and Google is caching this. The message is enclosed within and but it still is being cached. I'm going to ask the development mean to move the message at the bottom of the page and fix the position, but reviewing other websites with cookie messages, Google isn't caching them in their text only versions. Any tips or advice?
Technical SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Top pages give " page not found"
A lot of my top pages point to images in a gallery on my site. When I click on the url under the name of the jpg file I get an error page not found. For instance this link: http://www.fastingfotografie.nl/architectuur-landschap/single-gallery/10162327 Is this a problem? Thanks. Thomas. JkLej.png
Technical SEO | | thomasfasting0 -
Masses (5,168 issues found) of Duplicate content.
Hi Mozzers, I have a site that has returned 5,168 issues with duplicate content. Where would you start? I started sorting via High page Authority first the highest being 28 all the way down to 1. I did want to use the rel=canonical tag as the site has many redirects already. The duplicates are caused by various category and cross category pages and search results such as ....page/1?show=2&sort=rand. I was thinking of going down the lines of a URL rewrite and changing the search anyway. Is it work redirecting everything in terms of results versus the effort of changing all the 5,168 issues? Thanks sm
Technical SEO | | Metropolis0 -
How to handle Not found Crawl errors?
I'm using Google webmaster tools and able to see Not found Crawl errors. I have set up custom 404 page for all broken links. You can see my custom 404 page as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/404 But, I have question about it. Will it require to set 301 redirect for broken links which found in Google webmaster tools?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Once duplicate content found, worth changing page or forget it?
Hi, the SEOmoz crawler has found over 1000 duplicate pages on my site. The majority are based on location and unfortunately I didn't have time to add much location based info. My question is, if Google has already discovered these, determined they are duplicate, and chosen the main ones to show on the SERPS, is it worth me updating all of them with localalized information so Google accepts the changes and maybe considers them different pages? Or do you think they'll always be considered duplicates now?
Technical SEO | | SpecialCase0
