Many marketers have gotten those frightening emails from Google letting the site owner know that their site has been manually punished for publishing spammy content or using poor quality links. These emails have been quite mystifying for many in the past because there was typically little to no information about what the exact cause of the “Google Slap” was. It was recently announced by Google, however, that they are putting in a new feature for Webmaster Tools which will provide additional details about these messages.
This increased transparency is another step made by Google to help webmasters remain in compliance with their “white hat” SEO standards. The new Manual Actions feature is one more example of how Google is finally trying to work with webmasters, rather than against them.
The feature, which is said to be supplementary to the messages that are sent out by the web spam team, will help SEOs to understand what the issue is, and whether the penalty is going to be affecting their entire site or just one page.
Along with this added information, the Manual Actions feature will also help webmasters submit a request to review their site. This is the method by which webmasters can notify Google that all the issues have been fixed, so Google can re-evaluate the site to see if the ‘punishment’ can be removed. Having this tool added in right with the manual review notification should save webmasters a lot of time and effort when dealing with these unfortunate circumstances.
It is important to note that these changes are only affecting those sites which have been notified by Google that their domain is being removed due to a manual action. It is only approximately 2% of domains which are removed from the SERPs through these manually checks, so it is unlikely that most marketers will see this type of notification. Still, it is a step in the right direction by Google, and one that will be appreciated by those who do get this type of notification.
Webmasters who have lost their rankings due to Penguin, Panda or another algorithmic changes will need to attempt to manually figure out the cause, and take action to fix the issue. Of course, the best way to avoid this problem is to continue to publish high-quality, unique content and use only natural link-building techniques.
Have you ever gotten one of these manual review notifications from Google? What do you think of this update?
You can see the announcement from Google on this new feature HERE.