Google Now Reporting 100% Of Manual Actions

Have you ever stopped and thought to yourself, “I wonder if a human at Google has ever reviewed my site and then decided if it deserves to be penalised or not in within the search results?” Well Google is now reporting back on such cases nearly 100% of the time. In fact, below you can find a statement from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, about this when he was talking at the Pubcon conference this week:

“We’ve actually started to send messages for pretty much every manual action that we do that will directly impact the ranking of your site.” He also continued to say, “If there’s some manual action taken by the manual web spam team that means your web site is going to rank directly lower in the search results, we’re telling webmasters about pretty much about all of those situations,”

Cutts, however, said that there may be a rare “corner case” in which a site isn’t reviewed fully by a human, but that is very unlikely and they are intending to get 100% reviewed manually. Cutts even said “and as far as I know, we’re actually there.”

Back in June when SMX Advanced was on, Cutts said something very similar, although that time he said 99% and not 100%, so this is very noteworthy and is worth all of your attention.

With all of the current updates and algorithm refreshes that are occurring it is a very good time to discuss manual and algorithmic actions. In fact Google would rather refer to them as “actions” than penalties, even though the people who have been impacted would feel it was more of a penalty than an action, due to the much lower ranks, some dramatically so.

Manual Actions

When it comes to manual actions, some human being working at Google has actually reviewed your site personally and has decided to issue a penalty against it, for whatever reason is then provided to you, usually within a message on your webmasters, (usually manual actions are indeed penalties.)These reviews that are carried out on your site can be triggered by two different things, either a spam report that has been submitted by an outsider, or just Google’s regular policing.

When you need to remove manual penalties from your website it will more often than not involve you filing out a reconsideration request, as well as you showing that you are putting the effort in to ensure that the problem has been corrected. As an example, last year, JC Penney was hit with a 90 day penalty for paid links. There was an effort shown from this person to then clean up those links, a reconsideration request was then submitted and the penalty implied was eventually removed, the penalty that was carried out on the site was deemed “tough and the appropriate length.”

The important part is, how do you know if you have a manual action? These manual actions should be reported to you through the Google Webmaster Central, that is if you have verified your site there.

Algorithmic Actions

With algorithmic action, Google has implied a penalty against your website through automated means. Or in other words, something within your site is stopping Google’s computer algorithms from ranking your websites as high as it could be.

This feels like a penalty, right?” I know and we feel that way too, however Google is adamant that algorithmic actions are not penalties and are instead simply a part of how Google ranks your website overall. Indeed, Google uses a very wide range of factors to determine how well your website will rank. Websites that please this algorithm tend to do well, whereas those that, well they get less visibility. That’s SEO 101.

However for a period of around two years now, Google has introduced a large number of algorithmic filters or “updates” that as you may well know have had a very noticeable impact on some websites out there, much farther beyond its usual algorithmic tweaks. The names of these updates that have occurred over the past two years will be familiar to many of you out there:

Panda

This was introduced back in February 2011, its purpose was to fight those sites out there with that have very poor quality content

Top Heavy

Launched back in January 2012, it was introduced to prevent websites out there that were “top heavy” with ads from ranking well.

Penguin

This was introduced back in April 2012, It was intended to better combat the web spam out there.

Pirate

This algorithm was launched in August 2012, it was created to penalise those websites with a large amount of copyright complaints.

EMD

Introduced in Sept. 2012, this algorithms jobs was to prevent poor quality “exact match domain” sites from ranking well within the search results.

Any websites that fall underneath these categories are very likely to have been given a penalty. However unlike when you are given a manual action, filing a reconsideration request and submitting it will not help you in any way. The only way to combat against these algorithms is to make changes on your website and wait for the filter that his inducted a penalty on your site to update. After this see if your site is no longer caught within the penalty.