One of our sites received a Manual Penalty for unnatural links by Google. However, we never received a message in Google Search Console or an email about the manual action. The only reason we knew about the penalty is by the obvious drop in rankings, then signing into search console to look for any manual actions, which we found.

Since then, we have submitted a disavow file and a reconsideration request. However, once again we did not receive an email or message in search console that shows confirmation of the disavow or that they received the reconsideration request. The disavow file does show up after I upload it, and it says it was successfully uploaded... but no messages or emails.

After many hours of investigating the various canonical versions of our website on Search Console, we found out that there were several “owners” of the various canonical versions of our site that had “could not find the email address” as a site owner. We found out that these were previous employees who no longer worked with the company and their email address was deleted.

After unverifying these site owners, (all the ones that had “could not find the email address” as the site owner), the notifications, emails and messages in Search Console started to appear.

However, the only place they did not appear, is the main canonical version of our site. Of course, the main canonical version of our site (https://www) is the version that we uploaded the disavow and reconsideration request. This is the canonical version of the site that we need to receive these messages to know if our reconsideration request was granted!

We’ve just reuploaded the disavow file and reconsideration request to all of the other canonical versions (2 of the 3 received the message about the penalty)…. and we are currently awaiting a response.

Has anybody else had problems with not receiving notifications in search console due to deleted email addresses?

Hi,

The way Wix is configured you can't see any of the on-page links within the source code.

Does anyone know if Google Bots still count the links on this page?

Here is the page in question: https://www.ncresourcecenter.org/business-directory

If you do think Google counts these links, can you please send me URL fetcher to prove that the links are crawlable?

Thank you SO much for your help.

Hi EPD,

I wanted to add one thing that hasn't been touched on. Meta keywords used to be extremely popular but people started abusing them - they would add dozens or even hundreds of meta keywords to low-quality landing pages to try and rank for various keywords. Google eventually caught on to this spammy tactic so that's why they are no longer a part of the algorithm.

There is one scenario in which meta keywords can be useful: internal site search. If you have an internal site search box on your site, you can add alternate product names or misspellings in the meta keyword field for popular products and it will help those products take users to the proper page and provide a good UX since most site search processors include meta keywords field when determining results. For example, If I sell gonorrhea testing and everyone misspells it, they may frequently get a no results page. Adding misspellings to meta keywords field helps more people find the product they are looking for.

I would try to limit this to about five meta keywords per product though so it doesn't look spammy.

Cheers!

Screaming Frog can also do image sitemaps. Screaming Frog does have an annual cost of about £149, but it has other great tools besides image sitemaps so I think it is well worth the cost. I use Screaming Frog to get a "heartbeat" of what is going on with a site. It will show you any broken pages or pages missing h1s, page titles, etc.