Google in line with its goal to provide its customers with the best search results and give them what exactly they are looking for, formulates strategies and techniques including their complex algorithms and create their web spam team. When certain websites break Google’s rules or guidelines for websites their algorithm or web spam team automatically demotes or penalizes these websites that makes them less visible on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) or remove them completely from their search engine results, indexing, and crawling in the Internet in the search for quality information. Google also penalizes and demotes websites that use black hat SEO techniques or other tricky measures to increase their traffic and visibility. Google either penalizes or demotes websites through their algorithms or through manual spam actions by their web spam team.
What to do When Your Website is Penalized?
We should note that when Google penalizes or demotes websites, it is not the end of everything. Online marketers and website owners can still make actions to undo the manual spam actions or appeal to Google to remove their penalties and restore their website’s rankings and traffic. This is because Google believes that some web masters and web site owners just make reckless mistakes and they believe that these mistakes can be corrected. That is the use of Google’s Manual Actions feature in the Google Webmasters tools.
The Manual Actions Page
Here, website owners and web masters can see the reasons why Google penalized some of their webpages and websites. Here Google also gives webmasters and website owners their guidelines that the websites have violated and provides the actions that they can do in order to take off the penalties on their websites. On the Manual actions page, Google gives website owners the reason on why the action was done and its specific effects on their websites.
On the manual actions page, webmasters can see the site-wide matches and partial matches. The site-wide matches pertain to the manual actions undertaken by Google that affects the whole website. On the other hand, the partial matches are manual actions that affect only a part or a webpage of the website as a whole.
After webmasters and website owners have done the recommended actions to correct their mistakes on their websites, they can then submit an appeal or a claim to Google to recheck their websites and assess if it already meets their guidelines and does not violate any rules or does not incorporate any questionable tactics.
How to Use the Manual Actions Page
To be able to use the Manual Actions feature in the Google webmaster tools, website owners and marketers should go to their Webmaster Tools Dashboard. After that they should find and click the Search Traffic option. The webpage would then redirect and show the user various options, the user should then now click Manual Actions. There website owners and webmasters can see the manual actions that has been applied to their website and the things that they can do to correct them. When website owners and webmasters have successfully addressed and met the required actions to remove the penalties, they can then click on the Request a Review option on the Manual Actions Page in the Google Webmaster Tools. When Google receives the request, they would reassess the website and see if it now follows and meets their guidelines and if it does, they remove the penalties and restore the website’s page rankings and traffic.
There are many reasons why websites have been experiencing manual spam actions by Google algorithms and their web spam team. However, webmasters must understand that having a manual spam action on their websites is not the end of everything because there is always the Manual Actions Page to their rescue.
