Google Says Repeated Violations Of Their Webmaster Guidelines Will Lead To Further Action

Do you spam Google over and over again? Google may decide to serve you harsher penalties and manual actions in the future.

Chat with SearchBot

google-penalty1-ss-1920

In a blog post this morning, written anonymously at the Google Webmaster Blog, Google’s Search Quality Team said that if webmasters repeatedly violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines and get caught, Google may take “further action” against their sites and/or make “a successful reconsideration process more difficult to achieve.”

Google is talking specifically about manual actions, the penalties you see in the Google Search Console, issued manually by Google Search Quality representatives. This is not talking about the algorithmic actions that happen automatically through algorithms such as Panda, Penguin and the other search quality algorithms.

The example given by Google was “a webmaster who received a Manual Action notification based on an unnatural link to another site may nofollow the link, submit a reconsideration request, then, after successfully being reconsidered, delete the nofollow for the link.” In these cases, the webmaster may see that it is harder to receive a successful reconsideration request, or he may see stiffer penalties on his site.

I asked Google to comment about what specifically they mean by further action, and I am waiting for a reply. But I suspect this may mean that the site may have a longer time period to wait to get out of the penalty, or the action man be as extreme as deindexing the whole site from Google.

You may be able to learn more about that intent at the Google Webmaster Blog.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.