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If websites violate Google’s Webmaster guidelines, Google imposes penalties on the sites. This is known as Manual spam action. Depending on how severe the web spam is the websites may be penalised partially or wholly. The site falls in terms of rankings and in some cases they are totally removed from search results. If websites practice spam techniques they are completely removed from search engines. If you wake up one morning to find that your site’s traffic has fallen, you will know that Google has taken action against your site. Usually if there are unnatural links, which point towards your website your website may be penalised by Google.
Manual spam actions
If you are losing traffic, fast check the Manual actions page from the webmasters tool to find out whether you have violated the webmaster guidelines. A manual spam action can take place in the following cases:
- If you have taken resort to cloaking, where certain pages are not revealed to search engine bots Google may penalize you. If you face this problem, you need to send a reconsideration request to Google. Check the portions of the page to find the associated problems.
- If you are website has been hacked by a third party Google will penalize your site. The websites are categorised as compromised. After this manual action has been taken by Google ensure that your site does not contain spammy contents. Once you choose your recovery process you need to take your site offline so that hackers do not cause further harm.
Google applies manual penalty
Manual action can be taken in several cases. We can list them as follows:
- If you take part in keyword stuffing while developing your webpage, it may not enrich the content of the page. In such cases, Google will penalize your site as you have violated the Google’s webmaster guidelines. Check for repeated words in paragraphs and check tags.
- If you use hidden texts to manipulate search results, your website may be penalised and removed from search results. You can use CSS styling to find hidden texts.
A case of image mismatch
Image mismatch is one of the new webspams which have been added to the list of manual action spams. If the image which the viewers see varies from that which can be seen on the search engine result pages, your website may be penalised. For image mismatch, Google will impose a penalty. If manual action is taken for some of the pages, a partial spam action is imposed by Google. For better ranks in search engines, you will have to remove the penalty. To remove the penalties ensure that the same image is viewed from search results and the visitors to the site also see the same image.
Address problems at the earliest
Experts feel that if you are dealing with a case of pure spam you must document all that you are doing. Recently Google launched a manual action viewer with the help of which you can ascertain if your site has any manual actions applied to it. Google makes use of algorithms to evaluate and improve the quality of websites. From the manual actions page, you can request a review of your site once you are sure that your site abides by the webmaster guidelines. As the web is fast evolving, rankings of your page may fluctuate. So be aware of the manual spam actions which can have a large impact on your site’s rankings.
On manual actions page, two kinds of actions are displayed. They include partial matches and site-wide matches. In case of site wide matches actions have an impact on the entire site. Partial matches impact some sections of a site. Google is always taking steps to improve search and using advanced algorithms to fight spam.
Author Bio: Fred used services of NY web designers to build his company’s site. The well-developed site has not been impacted by the manual actions spam as yet. To check his site you can visit – http://topwebdesignny.com/
