• Search Engine Land
  • Sections
    • SEO
    • SEM
    • Local
    • Retail
    • Google
    • Bing
    • Social
    • Resources
    • More
    • Home
  • Search Engine Land
  • SEO
  • SEM
  • Local
  • Retail
  • Google
  • Bing
  • Social
  • Resources
  • Live
  • More
  • Events
  • SUBSCRIBE

Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land
  • SEO
  • SEM
  • Local
  • Retail
  • Google
  • Bing
  • Social
  • Resources
  • More
  • Newsletters
  • Home
SEO

Nearly A Year Later, Google’s Penalty Notices Remain Confusing

Nearly a year after Google’s Matt Cutts told us penalty notifications will get clearer, including more actual examples of what a problem is, it seems as if the notifications have gotten harder to understand. I spend a lot of time following penalties issued by Google through examples given to me via email, penalties publicizes on blogs […]

Barry Schwartz on March 24, 2014 at 9:18 am
  • More

google-webmaster-tools-video-1330350240Nearly a year after Google’s Matt Cutts told us penalty notifications will get clearer, including more actual examples of what a problem is, it seems as if the notifications have gotten harder to understand.

I spend a lot of time following penalties issued by Google through examples given to me via email, penalties publicizes on blogs and then examples posted in the Google webmaster forums, where people are confused. And in the past week, two good examples of experienced people and companies being confused have come up.

Experienced SEO Company Confused Over Penalty

Last week, an experienced SEO company named Portent was confused over a penalty notification they received over unnatural links. The notification read like most the notifications I see:

Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to portent.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.

This is what Portent received and this is a very, very common notification seen by most of those who receive a link penalty by Google. And while Google told us that Google will be giving example URLs of links causing the penalties “for the most part,” this didn’t appear to happen for Portent — and I commonly find others saying they lack this guidance, too.

It turns out that the Portent manual action was reversed incredibly quickly, which kind of implies something was wrong with the notification. But this experience SEO company was “amused” by the action, not understanding how they would have received an unnatural link notification. And this is what they do every day.

MyBlogGuest’s Confusing Manual Action:

Last week, you heard of the large penalty Google issued to a large guest blog network where MyBlogGuest publishers seemed to have been penalized.

The confusing part was MyBlogGuest.com itself received a manual action notification in Google Webmaster Tools. The manual action was virtually the same as the others I’ve seen. It read:

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. These may be the result of buying links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

Why did this confuse Ann Smarty, a long time SEO and the owner of the guest blog service? Well, if the guest blog network itself was penalized, why didn’t the penalty say that. Why is the penalty notification about having unnatural links to the myblogguest.com domain versus the myblogguest.com domain being the cause of the unnatural links?

In short, why does it seem that MyBlogGuest was hit by a manual action for links versus being part of a linking scheme itself?

Google Sheds Some Light

Some are finding this confusing, a sign that Google’s perhaps mixed up in the signals it’s sending. While Google wouldn’t comment about MyBlogGuest specifically, it did say that one reasonable explanation anyone running a network might consider, if hit with a penalty for links pointing to their own site, is that as part of investigating the network or service, bad inbound links might also have been found.

So while Google seems to have not issued a warning to the network for being the source of the penalty, it may have issued a notification that the network itself is linking back to itself and thus has unnatural links pointing to the site.

Either way, you can see why these notifications get confusing, while they should have been getting easier to understand.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts about a year ago about making these notifications easier to understand:



About The Author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz 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's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

Related Topics

Channel: SEOFeatures: AnalysisGoogle: PenaltiesGoogle: Search ConsoleGoogle: SEO

We're listening.

Have something to say about this article? Share it with us on Facebook, Twitter or our LinkedIn Group.

Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.

Processing...Please wait.

See terms.

ATTEND OUR EVENTS

Lorem ipsum doler this is promo text about SMX events.

June 15-16, 2021: SMX Advanced

June 21-22, 2021: SMX Advanced Europe

August 17, 2021: SMX Convert

November 9-10, 2021: SMX Next

December 14, 2021: SMX Code

Available On-Demand: SMX

Available On-Demand: SMX Report

Available On-Demand: SMX Create

×


Learn More About Our SMX Events

Discover actionable tactics that can help you overcome crucial marketing challenges. Our next conference will be held:

Next Event: Sept. 14-15, 2021

Available On-Demand: March 2021

Available On-Demand: October 2020

×

Attend MarTech - Click Here


Learn More About Our MarTech Events

White Papers

  • Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms
  • Selecting a Customer Data Platform For Your Organization: The 2020 Gartner Market Guide
  • The Complete Guide to Web Core Vitals
  • The New Era of Automation in SEO
  • Nielsen Annual Marketing Report: Era of Adaptation
See More Whitepapers

Webinars

  • Drive Customer Engagement with the Power of Personalization
  • 7 Use Cases That Prove Why You Should Implement DAM
  • Accelerate Your SEO & Content Marketing Program with 4 Key Milestones
See More Webinars

Research Reports

  • Local Marketing Solutions for Multi-Location Businesses
  • Enterprise Digital Asset Management Platforms
  • Identity Resolution Platforms
  • Customer Data Platforms
  • B2B Marketing Automation Platforms
  • Call Analytics Platforms
See More Research

Attend SMX For Only $199

h
Receive daily search news and analysis.

Channels

  • SEO
  • SEM
  • Local
  • Retail
  • Google
  • Bing
  • Social

Our Events

  • SMX
  • MarTech

Resources

  • White Papers
  • Research
  • Webinars

About

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Privacy
  • Marketing Opportunities
  • Staff

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Newsletters
  • RSS
  • Youtube

© 2021 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Your privacy means the world to us. We share your personal information only when you give us explicit permission to do so, and confirm we have your permission each time. Learn more by viewing our privacy policy.Ok