Google’s Matt Cutts recently announced that that if you get messages relating to site guidelines in your Webmaster account, you’ve been hit by a manual penalty.
Now, this is not an algorithmic penalty, it’s a manual process where a real person at Google is going through your site manually and checking it for any violations.
Google has a capability of manually inspecting you site and giving you a notification about the penalty via webmaster tools. There have been threads at webmaster world that have received such messages.
Dear site owner or webmaster of
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
I am very excited about this approach as Google now makes it clear if your site has been affected……well at least manually if not algorithmically.
As per Google, 99% of the sites that have been manually affected will get this message, this means that its time you start using the webmaster tools if you’ve not being using it regularly. And keep a check for messages on this, clean up your site if you receive any such messages and make a reconsideration request.
I am hoping Google can start using the webmaster tools to communicate with webmasters and be more transparent about their penalties ( manual or algorithmic ) and regular update. It will surely make the web a better place.
Have you checked your webmaster account ? Did you get any notification ?
Image Credits:Ataken Sevgi
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