Can someone that had (or seen) a Manual Action in WMTs tell me.....
-
This is a repost of this question http://moz.com/community/q/manual-action-found-in-wmts-no-email-no-message-in-wmts
But I'm sure there is someone in the moz fourms that have had/seen manual action
Someone I know said that they were looking though their WMTs and under Manual Actions they found they had a partial penalty. There is no date against it and they never got an email and there are no messages WMTs for it. I haven't personally dealt with a Manual penalty before, but I would have expected there to be a message in WMTs for it ( an email might have been missed because of a spam filter etc). Could it be a very old penalty?
-
Thanks for confirming that.
As its a old partial penalty, and from a quick look at their analytics I can't see any main pages that have been penalised , is it best to leave it alone ( in the short term at least)?
-
Hey Paddy Displays!
Sounds like an older penalty to me. I would highly suggest creating an email filter for @google.com so that future emails from WMT or other G related services won't go into spam. Just to play it safe!!
-
Hi there
I think you're inkling is correct, this would be an old penalty.
The manual action tab is relatively new, coming up to just a year old this month. Both myself and some agency buddies have seen sites that have had penalties in there when previously the site owner (and sometimes even the agency!) did not think there was a penalty.
If you have Webmaster Tools set up, you should always receive a message whenever manual action has been taken (bar a system error). However, in the past, for example, you may not have had WMT set up when a penalty has been applied, or you didn't have access to the account then. Therefore, the message would not be there for you to read, due to it not being sent or deleted. However, the manual action tab will show any penalties that the site has, regardless of when it was applied, when WMT was set up, or if a message was sent or not.
Therefore, if you're seeing a penalty notice in the tab but no message was received, I believe that means it would be an old penalty - as a new one would have also sent a message as well.
Hope that all makes sense.
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
-
Can you help by advising how to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my website with a 404 errorplease?
How to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my site. I'm getting a 404 error on a referred URL which is (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/[null id=43484])referred from URL (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/) The referred URL is the URL page that I want and I do not need it redirecting to the other URL as that's presenting a 404 error. I have tried saving the permalink in WordPress and recreated the .htaccess file and the problem is still there. Can you advise how to fix this please? Is it a case of removing the redirect? Is this advisable and how do I do that please? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
Manual Action
Quick question. As an example, a client has a site named site.com and then changed their business name and business url to site2.com I was informed that the site.com has a manual action (Pages affected by manual actions can see reduced display features, lower ranking, or even removal from Google Search results.) The page obviously is not active as it 301's to site2.com. Site.com has a 301 to site2.com. My questions? Does 301 transfer link power? So if a site is penalized, will the links that 301 cause problems to the new site2.com? I've requested them to remove the 301. Will, that fix it? Do we need to request a review? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Can you have 2 different websites on 1 webmaster tools account
Someone set up both our sites on the one webmaster tools account is this the best way to do it or should we have 2 different accounts. We are having problems with our site verification not working and our google shopping feeds not working could this be the cause.
Technical SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Similar Websites, Same C Block: Can I Get a Penalty?
One of my website has been heavily hit by Google's entire zoo so I decided to phase it out while building a new one. Old website: www.thewebhostinghero.com
Technical SEO | | sbrault74
New website: www.webhostinghero.com Now the thing is that both websites are obviously similar since I kept the branding. They also both have content about the same topics. No content has been copied or spinned or whatever though. Everything's original on both websites. There were only 3 parts of both websites that were too similar in terms of functionalities so I "noindexed" it on the old website. Now it seems that Google doesn't want you to have multiple websites for the same business just for the sake of occupying more space in the search results. This can especially be detected by the websites' C block. I am not sure if this is myth or fact though. So do you think I'm in a problematic situation with this scenario? It's getting ridiculous all you have to watch for when building a website, I'm afraid to touch my keyboard in fear my websites will get penalized! Sorry for my english btw.0 -
Can backlinks from advertising cause a traffic drop?
Hi, I recently noticed that our organic traffic has started to drop and maybe coincidently our adwords traffic has increased. I was asked to investigate the drop. I know that from the google update that unnatural backlinks would be penalized so I thought it might be the backlinks from a site that we advertise on because of the sheer number we have required from them in the last month. Would you think that would be the cause? if not, what could it be? and if it is, how do I go about correcting it as fast as possible? Any Help with this would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | digital.moretogether.com0 -
How can you avoid duplicate content within your own e-commerce website
One of the e-commerce websites I am working on is giving me a lot of duplicate content errors because all of the products are the same, just different sizes. Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this problem or should i just ignore it? Someone in the office brought up the idea to just use an i frame for all product descriptions. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | DTOSI0 -
Google is keeping very old title tags in the SERPs for my site. How can I fix this?
Hi Around 6 months ago a site I work with changed its brand. One company became two. Despite changing the title when a new site went live around 6 months ago Google still picks up the old title for certain search results relevant to the old title. When a search result is relevant to the new title it shows that. It's very frustrating as we are trying to re-brand and do not want the old brand name showing for some very important search results. Thanks in advance for your help Paul
Technical SEO | | pauldoffman0 -
Robots.txt file question? NEver seen this command before
Hey Everyone! Perhaps someone can help me. I came across this command in the robots.txt file of our Canadian corporate domain. I looked around online but can't seem to find a definitive answer (slightly relevant). the command line is as follows: Disallow: /*?* I'm guessing this might have something to do with blocking php string searches on the site?. It might also have something to do with blocking sub-domains, but the "?" mark puzzles me 😞 Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0