Jennifer Slegg posted an interesting case
of a manual action being revoked and then the same day reappearing and
then being revoked again. Interestingly enough, another complaint
about this popped up this morning on Google Webmaster Help forums.
@marie_haynes explained to Jennifer:
“I
have had 3 cases like this so far,” says Haynes. “All three were
partial actions for unnatural links. The frustrating thing is that I
can’t say for certain whether the manual action was ever removed from
the viewer. I have reviewed all of my emails to clients and can’t see
one where I say that the manual spam actions viewer was clean. But, I
usually don’t send my final bill until I see that the actions viewer
shows no manual spam actions. I really think that all three of these
had the viewer showing the penalty was clear and then somehow it just
reappeared.”
Why would this happen? Could it be the delay in manual actions? We know manual actions are processed twice daily but messages are sent once daily.
Jennifer got a response, well, two, from Google's John Mueller on Google+.
John wrote:
This
should be pretty rare -- but sometimes it can happen for a good reason.
For example, if the webspam team can recognize that a linking issue has
been mostly cleaned up, but still sees something that needs to be taken
care of, they might switch it to a partial action, so that only those
remaining, problematic links are taken care of, without affecting the
rest of the site. Usually that's a sign that you're on the right track,
that you've convinced the webspam team that a full manual action is no
longer necessary.
Without any
examples, there's not really much I can do. These processes are
constantly being analyzed and improved. Due to these requests being
reviewed manually, there is a possibility of edge-cases sometimes going
the wrong way (how much is "cleaned up enough"? It's sometimes hard to
determine objectively), and even mistakes could happen. That's why it's
useful to allow the webmaster (or you -- the experts who have worked
with lots of sites on similar issues) to submit another request. It's in
our own best interest to help webmasters efficiently solve problems
that come up (if they're willing to do that), and there's definitely no
"let's confuse webmasters" policy in place :).
So if you have
examples, you're welcome to send them my way. The webspam team takes
these very seriously. That said, sometimes there's not much more that we
can say to escalations, sometimes the webmaster just needs to do more
to clean things up.
John received the examples but has not responded since. I am not sure if he will.
Forum discussion at Google+ & Google Webmaster Help.
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