Google is notoriously secretive about its algorithm and the steps the company takes to fight web spam. Recently, Google has introduced a level of transparency in its Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools are beneficial to any site owner who wants to know how Google crawls and indexes site pages. Now, webmasters can review any penalties affecting site rank directly in Webmaster Tools instead of trying to guess and paying an outside vendor to confirm it.
Manual Actions and Penalties
What Google calls “manual action,” most people call a “penalty.” Manual action is not to be confused with an algorithm penalty. Google has several algorithms it uses to demote or rank a website. For instance, the Panda algorithm targets sites with low quality content. Panda is a part of the algorithm, so a site is said to have an algorithm penalty when it is affected strictly by the algorithm versus a manual demotion assigned by a Google employee.
Algorithm demotions cannot be turned on or off, and a reconsideration request does not help with algorithm rank. A loss in rank can be frustrating for webmasters who are unsure if the penalty is manual or through the algorithm.
The new section in Webmaster Tools is intended to help webmasters identify if the demotion is through the algorithm or a manual demotion by a web spam team member.
Manual action is usually more severe than an algorithm penalty. Manual action is only applied when the algorithm does not have the capacity to demote the site using automated methods. A manual penalty means a Google employee has reviewed the site and identified a number of quality guideline violations. If the violations are too severe, the employee will remove the site from the index altogether.
Dealing with Manual Penalties
To view if your site has a manual penalty, open Google Webmaster Tools in your browser. Under “Search Traffic” in the left navigation panel, click “Manual Actions.” If the site has a manual penalty, the message and reason for the penalty are displayed.
Two major messages have been circulating recently. The first message is the “Unnatural Link Warning” message. This message means a web spam employee has found unnatural links pointing to your site in an effort to pass PageRank. Any link you purchased, traded or placed on a website must be removed or the “nofollow” attribute added to the link. Unnatural links may also include excessive article marketing and press release links, which most webmasters may not identify as unnatural.
The second message is the “pure spam” message. This message indicates you have severe onsite SEO over-optimization issues. You could be selling links, you could have a plug-in affecting page code, or the site might use content automation tools to produce onsite text. Automated text is usually poorly constructed, and this guideline also includes text that is translated from one language to another using automated tools. Both of these methods result in poor quality content. All of these are violations of Google’s webmaster guidelines. Whatever the reason, you must remove the problem and file a reconsideration request. Many of these violations result in the site being totally removed from the index, so it’s important to quickly clean up the problem and file the reconsideration request.
If you have no messages in Webmaster Tools, you can still have algorithm issues. SEO continues to evolve as search engines attempt to combat spam issues. The best rule is to always create a site for users and avoid tactics that attempt to trick search engines. SEO should be about creating code that’s friendly for search engines, but pages should always be user friendly and full of useful content for your website.