Google is not only changing its algorithm making link building and search engine optimization difficult but has also introduced a few applications that could have similar effects on your SEO project. What these application changes are?
Latest introduction by Google is the manual spam actions that were added to the Google Webmaster Tools that will help webmasters to verify whether their site contains a manual spam action currently. Google has not confined its actions to launching the action and issuing notifications but also have created and released no less than seven videos elaborating the most common manual action notifications.
Videos that have been released include-
- User generated spam;
- Hidden text;
- Keyword stuffing;
- Pure spam;
- Thin content;
- Unnatural links to and from the site; and
- Manual links to site.
There is no ambiguities in the videos displayed and they depict clean and precise examples of all the items listed above and they also clarify the penalties that could result from all these. To drive home their points they also have included some examples of cases where such penalties have been imposed for violating the approved norms. Good thing about this is that they also indicate the ways of recovering from such penalties. In fact they have come with the process of submitting a reconsideration request for people that have inadvertently committed mistakes that might affect their SEO endeavor.
All said and done; Google has already added new feature in their Webmaster tools that will erase all doubts about how the ranking of sites are affected by manual web-spam actions and how to get rid of such problems. The tool is named as Manual Actions viewer and it is available under the “Search Traffic” tab which the users can use. It is added as a complement for the Google notifications to users about proper use of their features and search engine.
An interesting feature of Google is that a recent study by them and press release made accordingly indicates that only 2% of the domains or even less than them are manually removed owing to spam use. Hence majority of the sites will not find much to their interest or affecting them when they visit the Manual Actions applications and the message that they will find is that “No manual web spam actions found”, which means they are safe.
That does not solve the problems of the sites that are affected by Manual Web Spam tool because such sites will find on the Manual Actions viewer application the existing web spam problems and they will be displayed under a couple of headings. These two are –
- Site wide matches; and
- Partial matches.
Indications of problem will include one or more from over a dozen categories like “keyword stuffing”, “pure spam”, and “hidden text” etc.
All the same the sites that find them in the list are going to be affected adversely in their SEO project.