When we hear about the release of a new Google update which modifies the correct algorithm we can only
adapt to the news by reading SEO blogs and trying to Rio obtain past rankings.
In this case you will not be notified by anyone and technically it is only a change not a specific punishment
for your site manual penalties instead refer to manual actions applied by a Google team member quality
rater towards your site.
You'll notice this because you'll receive a notification in your Google search console account with
some details but how do these human beings really notice your site among millions of other sites.
Obviously Google has automated internal systems to provide lists of suspected cases to its collaborators
but there are also specific features such as spam report which allows any user to send a notification
to Big G when discovering someone who plays dirty like an unfair competitor in the unfortunate event.
You have already received a manual action against your web property.
You have probably already read one of the following reasons.
Misleading structured data.
Some pages may have improperly used a markup technique by showing different data in the visible text
and that Jason L.D. code Unnatural Links from or to your site for example by participating in link schemes
or practices such as exchanging or buying links without Rel equals no follow user spam.
Some users may post links inside spam comments in a blog hidden text or keyword stuffing.
These are over optimizations of the page to deceive.
Google cloaking the page shown to Google is different from the page viewed by users and low quality
content pages with no added value automatically generated or containing copied content.
In many cases the cause of a penalty is due to our aggressive approach which aims to over optimize the
pages or to get back links by force.
Other times it can happen to be victims of negative SCA attacks because although Google takes these
cases into account sometimes these attacks are successful.
If the cause is a sudden acquisition of spam back links you may need to use a disavow tool in your Google
search console account to remove all malicious incoming links and wait for the situation to be restored
by sending a reconsideration request with details about the actions taken at this point.
You might be wondering how do you know for sure if and when your site has been really affected by the
new algorithm or by a penalty the most effective way.
In my opinion is the verification of positions for various keywords.
If you notice a sudden drop for these values in the same period you should take immediate action to
solve the situation.
On the other hand there are also many false positives because a new competitor may have outcome many
of your previous positions after verifying that your site has been subjected to a manual action or an
algorithm update.
You will have to perform some activities to resolve the situation.
For example the hateful case of Unnatural Links is often highlighted by finding many back links with
spammy anchor texts in a situation of normality most anger text should be like click here.
Visit the site or branded as on my brand to try to resolve this over optimization.
You should contact all the webmasters of the linking sites kindly asking them to remove these back links
and in the worst case scenario you will have to use the disavow tool uploading the complete list of
these domains as you may have guessed these are difficult situations to deal with but following the
guidelines there are excellent chances of recovering past positions even if revenue not obtained in
the meantime is lost forever this often undermines the reputation of a site and it happens that discouraged
webmasters decide to abandon the project seeing no solution precisely for this reason.
It is important to check the history of the domain you want to register for your next project especially
by analyzing the back links if unfortunately you choose a deleted domain which in the past was penalized
and still has active spam links.
You could inherit many problems that would remain forever real example of manual personalization with
resolution working in this sector for over 10 years.
You could imagine that I was personally affected by these changes and so it was the approach must always
be professional.
We must not take it personally because there is a solution or a way to fix it which will allow us to
recover lost positions yes.
As you will have understood if you were hit by a manual penalty it is a great problem because your website
disappears from usual positions.
The traffic drops and in the case of a business you will notice a decline in revenue.
It's not a good situation and I don't wish it on anyone but in this sector it can happen and I would
like to tell you what happened to me and what I did to get out of it.
Recovering the traffic that I had in the past I refer to a site that I didn't consider very much and
fortunately it didn't have the particular influence on my business revenue but it was however an issue
to be solved as soon as possible after I suddenly received a notification inside my google search console
account with references to a manual action I started to get worried.
First of all I opened my site to check for any hacks or other incorrect practices but after some analysis
I didn't find anything relevant and so I thought it was my fault.
I decided to modify the home page by inserting a couple of images increasing the spaces between the
lists of articles and enlarging the fonts of the links to be better usable by mobile.
After that I opened some internal pages to apply similar optimizations to the user interface UI.
Finally I prepared a detailed answer for Google informing them of the operations I applied to meet their
warning and to prove my willingness to follow their rules at this point.
I could only wait and hope that the manual reviewer could understand that the site was legitimate and
it had nothing wrong and so it was because within a few days I received a positive response.
There was nothing left for me to do but only waiting to see the results.
As you can see from the statistics below there was a clear and sudden recovery in a short time at the
end of this bad experience.
I can say that I was lucky I managed to solve it in a few days but many colleagues do not get out of
it and it becomes a real nightmare for them.
This is one of the reasons why I do not recommend even to my students to follow the promising black
hat practices if at first everything goes well.
Suddenly you could lose everything and trying to recover will not always be possible especially in cases
where you do not know where to start.
Identifying the problem.