Manual Action
-
Quick question. As an example, a client has a site named site.com and then changed their business name and business url to site2.com
I was informed that the site.com has a manual action (Pages affected by manual actions can see reduced display features, lower ranking, or even removal from Google Search results.) The page obviously is not active as it 301's to site2.com.
Site.com has a 301 to site2.com. My questions?
Does 301 transfer link power? So if a site is penalized, will the links that 301 cause problems to the new site2.com?
I've requested them to remove the 301. Will, that fix it? Do we need to request a review?
Thank you
-
Awesome! I know how clients can be. Good thing they had someone like you! Have a good one
-
Kevin,
I wanted to give you an update. The client requested a Google review and it was accepted. Thank you for your input and advice.
-
Thanks, Kevin.
I'll recommend them to remove the 301 to the new site. Once that has been done, I'll have them send a review. Good to know, that the 301 can possibly hurt the new site.
I appreciate your comment. Very helpful.
-
Yes, the 301 can still impact the new site even if it's not around anymore. If the legacy site had spam, cloaking or etc and is no longer live-- should be relatively straightforward to request a review and getting it resolved. If the legacy site had unnatural links to it, and you 301 to new site, could be lead to issues to the new site. I would most likely take down the 301 and request a review to get resolved. Once resolved, do the 301. Good luck!
-
Thanks. Yes, the content for the new site is all original. The site.com can't be accessed. It automatically 301 to the new site.
So, there is no content on the site that Google says has a penalty. Should I ask for a review since they will remove the 301?
Thanks
-
If you change the domain, even without a 301, and the content is the same Google may pass the it. Source from 2014. The best solution is try to clean up the manual action or create original content on new site.
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
-
Recovery After A Hack - No Manual Action Notice
Hi Guys, I am helping out an agency who have had a couple of site hacked on their server. I can confirm by correlating increase in not found errors and drop in rankings, that the drop was definitely hack based although the site had no manual action notice from Google. The site looks to have been fixed i.e all not found pages look to have been sorted. Obviously there are some dodgy backlinks to now non existant pages but it looks like two months on no sign of a recovery. Is this normal?, Could the site still be hacked and the web designer is claming it has been cleaned up? I am used to dealing with hacked sites when there has been a manual action listed and then it's quite easy to complete the clean up work, submit a reconsideration and then get the manual action revoked but when you don't receieve a manual notification and the site doesn't recover, what do you do? Kind Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
Is putting a manufacturer's product manual on my site in PDF duplicate content
I add the product manuals to our product pages to provide additional product information to our customers. Is this considered duplicate content? Is there a best way to do this so that I can offer the information to my customers without getting penalized for it? Should they be indexable? If not how do I control?
Technical SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Rankings after manual penalty removal
I've just started working on a ecommerce website that was hit by Penguin 2.0 in May (It was ranking 2nd for it's major keyword at the time) and it hasn't been indexing for that keyword since After a lot of link removal, the reconsideration request was accepted and the manual penalty had been removed. Rankings haven't really improved and that specific keyword has not been reindexed The site does have a lot of not found errors (It was 5.5k but recently taken down to 4k) but it was still ranking before the penalty. Is there anything you believe I'm missing? Is it the onsite errors that are flagging the site as unreliable? I thought it would still appear for the keyword if that was the case
Technical SEO | | Sandeep_Matharu0 -
Will manually autotagging my adwors campaign work?
Good Morning from 17°C Mostly Cloudy Humidity: 85% Wetherby Uk 🙂 For reasons too arduous to detail autotagging my ppc ads is not working in that Google analytics ppc data is missing:-( To fix this I've gone down ther route of manually autotagging the my ppc campaigns by adding this onto the end of the campaign urls - www.aldermedia.co.uk/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={keyword}&utm_campaign=Aldermedia My question "But will adding curly brackets around the work keyword as in {keyword} dynamically record the different keywords used and show in analytis?" Below is a screenshot of the situation: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/manually-autotagging-campaigns-screenshotcopy.jpg I have disabled autotagging in the ppc dashboard to allow for autotagiing to work but ultimately I want to see some ppc data in the campaigns section of Google analytics and I really want to know what paid terms visitors entered. Hope this all makes some sense, please take a look at the above screenshot to help. Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Dealing with manual penalty...
I'm in the back-and-forth with Google's Quality Search team at the moment. We discovered a manual penalty on our website and have been trying to get it removed as of late. Problem is, tons of spammy incoming links. We did not ask for or purchase any of these links, it just so happens that spammy websites are linking to our site. Regardless, I've done my best to remove quite a few links in the past week or so, responding to the Quality Search team with a spreadsheet of the links in question and the action taken on each link. No luck so far. I've heard that if I send an email to a website asking for a link removal, I should share that with Google as well. I may try that. Some of the links are posted on websites with no contact info. A WhoIs search brings up a hidden registrant. Removing these links is far from easy. My question is, what are some techniques that are proven to be effective when working your way through the removal of a manual penalty? I know Google isn't going to tell me all of the offending links (they've offered a few examples, we've had those removed - still penalized) so what's the best way for me to find them myself? And, when I have a link removed, it may stay in Webmaster Tools as an active link for a while even though it no longer exists. Does the Quality Search team use Webmaster Tools to check or do they use something else? It's an open-ended question, really. Any help dealing with a manual penalty and what you have done to get that penalty removed is of great help to me. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ccorlando0 -
How can you manually diagnose the canonical problem
Good Monrning from snow dusted minus 3 degrees C Wetherby UK... Is there a quick way to diagnose wether or not a website has a canonical problem or not? So far Ive been doing this for example: Typing a full web address then one without the w's and seeing if a 301 redirect has been set up. But I'm not confident this is the best way to diagnose if there is a canonical problem with a site. I would like to ad that I want to see if a canonical problem exists with any site and webmanster tools is not available. Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing1 -
Understanding the actions needed from a Crawl Report
I've just joined SEOMOZ last week and have not even received my first full-crawl yet, but as you know, I do get the re-crawl report. It shows I have 50 301's and 20 rel canonical's. I'm still very confused as to what I'm supposed to fix...And, all the rel canonical's are my sites main pages, so hence I am still equally confused as to what the canonical is doing and how do I properly setup my site. I'm a technical person and can grasp most things fairly quickly, but on this the light bulb is taking a little while longer to fire-up 🙂 If my question wasn't total jibberish and you can help shed some light, I would be forever grateful. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | apmgsmith0 -
Sudden ranking drop, no manual action
Sort of a strange situation I'm having and I wanted to see if I could get some thoughts. Here's what has happened... Monday morning, I realized that my website, which had been showing up at the bottom of page 2 for a specific result, had now been demoted to the bottom of page 6 (roughly a 40 spot demotion). No other keyword searches were affected. I immediately figured that this was some sort of keyword-specific penalty that I had incurred. I had done a bit of link building over the weekend (two or three directory type sites and a bio link from a site I contribute to). I also changed some anchor text on another site to match my homepage's title tag (which just so happened to be the exact phrase match I had dropped in) - I assumed this was what got me. I was slowly beginning to climb up the rankings and just got a bit impatient/overzealous. Changed the anchor text back to what it originally was and submitted a reconsideration request on Tuesday. This morning, I get the automated response in Webmaster Tools that no manual action had been taken. So my question is, would this drop have been an automated deal? If that's the case, then it's going to be mighty hard to pinpoint what I did wrong, since there's no way to know when I did whatever it was to cause the drop. Any ideas/thoughts/suggestions to regain my modest original placement?
Technical SEO | | sandlappercreative0