Manual Action but not?

spunko2010

Hi, I've had a few manual actions in the past as either someone is reporting my sites or Google is watching my niche. I had a few more last week, but this time it's different. in GWT there is a notice when you view the 'index page' but when you go to the Search Traffic -> Manual Actions page it says 'no manual actions found'.

Anyone ever seen this?

Tim89

I don't use GWT at all, stopped using it back in 2011.

spunko2010

I know a lot of people here don't use it and I see why. It's useful if you use 301s though to figure out which one has been slapped quite easily.

Tim89

Hmm, there must be another way to figure out if a domain is slapped.

I think the main reasons you're hitting these google brickwalls is because of GWT's.

mda1125

I stopped using it as well.  Why give Google all your info on a Silver platter?
Let them figure it out.

My biggest laugh is the Google Disavow tool which is nothing but a tattle tale app.

spunko2010

I don't and will never use disavow. I never bother with reconsideration requests either for the same reason.

However what information does GWT give them that they don't already have, exactly? Maybe my IP address but I use a proxy to be sure. I'm all for trying out new things so I'll stop using it next time just to try it out, but I can't see what information it's giving the enemy

Tim89

Statistics

donchino

Ya, they can prob see better with GWT if your traffic relies mainly on Google (is seo project), or not. If they can't see it, they can't tell if you have a real brand and ppl also visit it directly, from fb or whatever source. Also have stopped using it since few yrs back

donchino

Also I've sometimes wondered, if G says not to do any seo at all, and let everything go the natural way.. why should anyone even bother to install GWT in their eyes? It's like telling them you're playing against the rules

2Take2

I don't use GWT on any of my sites either, but if I had to guess I'd say that the manual reviews are more likely related to the fact that 301s are being used (I'm guessing heavily?) than anything else. Sorry it doesn't answer the original question though.

mda1125

"However what information does GWT give them that they don't already have, exactly?"

A nice map of all the sites you own as you add GWTs to all your sites?
A really good idea of your linking so a pattern can be established per site?

You can have a penalty placed on your site without any such warning in GWT.

Check out the Google Product forums under Indexing/Search

Look at all those sorry saps that have lost all traffic without so much as a single warning.

IMHO - a manual action = death as in Google has caught you, so much they can actually feel confident in giving you such a warning vs just penalizing some links because they aren't sure what's up.

Let em guess.  Why hand over everything.  If they already know, so be it but I'm not helping a billion dollar company do their job.  They have a web spam team.  They can work for the paycheck.  No need for me to give them help since I don't get a cut of the check (GWT)

There are many many other great web stat tools that you can use to figure out what's up with your site.

seo22

hello there everyone , interesting discussion  I would like to share some info , gwt & ga are good but you need to be careful don't put all websites in the same account , create an account for everysite

why it's good ? because we try to rank on google , so the best stats are from the company ranking our website right ? 

can you share some other tools ? I mean tried ones & reliable 

until now I have tried statcounter , xiti 

any info is appreciated

spunko2010

I don't use the same IP address or email address for any of my GWT accounts. I just use proxies.

I'd be interested in hearing what alternatives there are, too. I use Clicky for stats.

spunko2010

Just to update this. I relaunched many of my sites last week without adding GWT to them. A week later and they've all been manually slapped - even those that have 0 links. WTF.


I'm going to move onto another niche in the short-term, has anyone got any insight into how long the drones at Google follow a niche before moving on and getting bored?

william88

what was your niche?
how experienced are you in this type of thing?

spunko2010

Not giving away my niche and not giving you any money.

Tim89

Damn, your niche must be spammy for them to bother controlling it.

I've never experienced anything like that before, are they deindexing your sites or what? What do you mean by 'slapped'.

If it's primarily due to your ranking strategy, for example, redirected domains, try a different ranking method whilst in the mean time, use your redirects for a different niche until you're able to rank in your other niche using a somewhat more ethical ranking strategy.

spunko2010

My niche isn't that spammy really, I've dominated it for about 2 years and I think my main competitors (multimillion $ turnovers) just kept reporting me to Google until they took notice. Or it could be a BH competitor has entered the ring and done the same as me and they noticed it that way. S/he keeps getting slapped too I think.

By 'slapped' I mean that I get unnatural link warnings (manual action) and the entire site gets demoted to page 7 or 10 or whatever. I've been using 301s quite extensively and have ditched that for now. The oddest thing is they whacked a site that has literally 0 sites linking to it. It wasn't even ranking that well.

So far the only site that's still ranking (for now...?) is one where I've changed all the old 301s to just a standard nofollow link and pointed them to a new domain. Like this:

a href='newdomain.com' rel='nofollow'>Our new site</ a

Fatt Cutts is quite ambiguous on whether nofollows can get penalised so I'll just have to wait and see.  If this fails I've tried everything else I can think of; 302 redirects, 301 redirects, just a standard dofollow link, 301ing via a blog.wordpress.com site, etc. I've got some great authority domains that haven't been whacked, but since it's manual action it's harder to trick them. And I used to think Google had outsourced it's 10-strong webspam monkeys to India... If only.

Tim89

Hmm, do you mind PMing me the niche so I'm able to take a look? Not that it would be beneficial, I'm just curious.

It you are not using GWT for the newer sites, how are you receiving these unnatural link warnings?

spunko2010

I'm not using GWT now, I'm just assuming that is the reason this time because it was always the reason when I used to use it.... Literally every time.

I'm using Clicky and when I look back I always see someone with user-agent Google from Mountain View, CA (!) visiting the site and clicking a few pages, then 1-2 hours late the visitor numbers fall off the planet.

spunko2010

Spent ages last night going through all the links pointing to my 301s on AHrefs. Turns out someone has spammed a load of them to shit with words like 'payday loans' etc. Probably why I entered the Google radar. 25k links in a week etc.

Interestingly the only decent authority domains I have left that aren't slapped, are those domains. I've been fairly sure Google has some sort of negative SEO filter or whitelist, pretty sure this is evidence of it. They MUST have noticed these domains, when they're hitting my other 301s with like 80 PBN links with manual actions. Weird.

davbel

@Spunko2010 perhaps there's a Googler working that niche too

spunko2010

Probably...

I'm buying a competitors 'very' white hat website so that should tide me over until the f**k off.

Think I'm also going to buy a decent expired domain, if such a thing exists, that already has decent WH links. Anyone know of a place? All the ones on Expireddomains.net are quite cheap but not too great. Is there a service where you can buy say 4-5 figure relevant expired domains?

donchino

Nice you share your experience. I sent you PM, maybe it helps

Water

"Turns out someone has spammed a load of them to shit with words like 'payday loans' etc."

Very interesting. I saw the same spam anchors in my niche.

JudderMan

Darko on BHW - username is accelerator_dd I think - he runs Serpbuddy and sells aged domains with awesome link profiles. I bought ten and just building them up now. You get to pick and choose niche, and see a handful of the types of links each domain has.

Have you tried moving host? I am very close to moving all of my sites and scattering them across various different companies as I keep on seeing the same IP looking at all of my sites (which are on different hosting accounts but same company...silly I know but easier to manage and I've already paid the year upfront).

Maybe the payday loan spammers were drilling your domain and getting ready to hack it to rank? Could just be a coincidence, especially if you have a decent domain that has been ranking well for 2 years, but usually they go for gov/edu/ac sites to hack.

spunko2010

@JudderMan

I've bought a couple of aged domains already and am developing them now. Google hit one of my sites with an unnatural link penalty even though it has 0 links pointing to it, even using their own tools. Crazy.

JudderMan

Checked wayback? Maybe it has a shitty link profile from before?

spunko2010

Nope, brand new, nobody would register it lol. They are just checking my niche and I assume don't want me to re-enter it.

Water

Had such unnatural link penalty year ago on "empty" domains. I thought the main problem was hosting.

Than I took registered and not hosted domain. Added NS record, added simple html with "hello world" on hosting and launched GWT script. This site got the same message.

So the can be hosting or even registar(not so big and famous)

spunko2010

Just to update, I've bought a DMOZ listed domain with my keyword in it that has natural links from Telegraph, BBC, etc. I'm not going to build a single link or redirect to it. I launched it on Friday and it's already hovering on page 3 for loads of KWs. If it gets slapped by Google then I know they're after me.

Just to be safe it's also hosted under a different account with different WHOIS.