Question about New Client with Manual Actions / Partial Matches in GWT
-
We just signed on a new client and are gaining access to their Analytics, GWT, etc... In GWT, we quickly went to "Manual Actions" as the client stated they've been slipping in rankings the past couple months from 1 to 4 to 8 and have been staying at around 7/8 for 15 of their main keywords.
Without getting into the specifics of their keyword rankings, I'm curious to know when they may have received the Partial Matches Manual Action from Google. I checked Messages and saw nothing about the Manual Actions update. Can anyone lend some advice as we are most likely going to have to put together a Disavow text file and begin sending requests to take down links.
Thank you in advance. Hope this was clear enough, but let me know if you need more info.
- Patrick
-
Just wanted to mention that it's possible that the client themselves still has the original message in their Webmaster Tools. I have worked on some sites where even though I was given full access to WMT I could not see their messages. But, the original site owners could still see them.
Regardless, the date doesn't really matter, does it? You've got work to do!
-
Thanks, Chris. You are correct in that now we at least know something is going on. Better to have this Manual Action notice than the Algo notice with crashing rankings. We'll get in to clean things up and submit for reconsideration.
-
Doesn't really help but have seen the same thing, with the same notice but no way of knowing when the penalty was applied.
Other than drops in traffic, it seems there is no way to know whether the site is only affected by the manual penalty, or by both manual and algorithmic. (at least the manual action opens the door to a reconsideration request and therefore some feedback)
-
Manual actions aren't update based, they happen on an ongoing basis when someone at Google looks at the site and decides it's in violation of their guidelines.
Good luck !
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword Targeting / Cannibalisation
Hi Guys We're about to launch a very large website for a flooring company and would like to find out more about _key word _cannibalisation - to put my mind at rest. I know Rand posted a Whiteboard Friday early last year about this topic and mentioned using part of the same keyword was ok to use. All our keywords are specifically geared for "user intent" meaning each keyword has relevance and the content to back up the keyword. We've ensured the keywords are located within each url, placed at the start of the page title, h1 etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GaryVictory1 -
Do you get links from new websites?
There's a new industry specific website that looks decent. It's clean and nothing spammy. However, it's so new it's DA is under 10. Is it worth pursuing a link from a site like this? On one hand, there's nothing spammy and it is industry specific. On the other...it's just DA is so terrible (worse than any of our other links), I don't want it to hurt us. Any thoughts? Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Do allow or disavow, that is the question!
We're in the middle of a disavow process and we're having some difficulty deciding whether or not to disavow links from Justia.com and prweb.com - justia.com alone is giving us 23,000 links with just 76 linked pages. So, to allow, or disavow? That's the question! What do you think guys? Thank you. John.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers Any markup that could be used to be listed like this. Why is some sites listed like this and some not. Why is the adzuna.co.za page listed with Results 1-10 while some other with Jobs 1-10 ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | classifiedtech0 -
Google Places - Advanced Question
Hi All, Ive found multiple threads about previous issues but I haven't found any tailored to my specific question.I know there are a large amount of factors so I wanted to see if any other individuals had ran into this previously. We are currently in a centralized position in a major city. We are discussing moving the main office about 15 miles away into another city, moving us out of the main city where we have been for the past 3 years. The city where we are currently located has a lot more GEO search volume compared to the new city search terms and variants of. If we move will our local rankings drop when someone searches in the city where we were previously? How long would it take for this ranking to fall? Or would we still rank because we are moving a short distance away and have a large amount of citations there? I know we would need to change over all our online directories, on page etc..Any other suggestions on a smooth transition? I know there are many factors that go into this and any past experience, guidance and/or assistance is greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PRKEL0 -
No manual spam actions found - Now what to do
In last Panda update on 22nd January my site traffic reduced 30% to 40% but still some of my keywords are ranking on first and second page in SERP. With latest Penguin 2.0 update all of my keywords ranking is out of 100. Both times I send reconsideration request and get message that No Manual actions found on site. I just don't know what steps are better to get ranking back. Should I use disavow tool and remove backlinks to recover from Penguin or work more on creating quality links. My Site : http://goo.gl/sSBes Thanks, Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveSchmidt0 -
Blog/Shop/Forum site structure - are we right to make these changes?
We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us. Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog). We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum. We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to: 301 redirect old URLs to new ones where they have changed. Submit new site maps to search engines. Update old links where we have control (such as forums where we are paid traders etc.). Send out a newsletter to our subscribers. Update our forum members. Fix errors via WMT before and after the re-structure. Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period? OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains? Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally! Thanks Jay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DWJames0 -
New Keywords stealing juice?
I already rank on the first page for all 13 of my main keyword terms. Is it possible for me to start ranking for additional key words on those page by adding additional content on the pages? How much impact will this have and will the new keywords still juice from my already good keywords? Also if I am already ranking well for those key words...with really horrible URL's. Would it be possible to add my new key words into the URL's? Since the current URL's seem to have nothing to do with my current rankings maybe I can keep my current rankings but then also get a huge boost for my new keyword rankings? Thank you, Boodreaux the novice. PS. I have already heard the great advice of keeping my old site map up for a while after I change the URL's in order to let google catch up and re-index the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0