Whilst viewing Webmaster Tools last night, I came across a new section under Search Traffic entitled “Manual Actions”. As you may know, my Martial Arts Videos website currently does not receive much traffic from Google. To be more precise: It receives less than five visits per day.
Google already responded to an email I sent them and confirmed that no manual penalties have been applied to my website. This new Manual Actions sections seems to confirm this. I checked all of my websites and did not see any website that had a penalty against it.
A quick search showed me that Matt Cutts announced this new feature last Thursday. It noted that under 2% of all domains indexed are marked as webspam.
I am really pleased that Google is adopting a more open-approach to penalties. Website owners have been in the dark in the past with these kinds of issues. Hopefully this trend will continue. I would really like to see them expand on this and give website owners more advise through Webmaster Tools. Perhaps they could follow the lead of their own Page Insights service that advises which details exactly what webmasters need to do to speed up their websites. Here’s hoping 🙂
If your suspect your website has had a penalty applied to it, I encourage you to log in to Webmaster Tools and check to see if that is indeed the case.
Kevin
Thank you Kevin for all the well laid-out information in your weekly posts! I usually bookmark some items that I know will be useful at some point, as for instance the announcement of the WP 2014 theme.
Fran
Thanks Fran. Glad you found it useful 🙂
Thank you, Kevin. Hadn’t heard of that before, so I was curious to check out my own 4 websites. No manual actions 🙂
Best regards from Greece,
David
No problem David. I imagine it penalties will only be applied to websites that have used black hat SEO techniques.
Then there’s no danger of manual action since although I have heard of black and white hat SEO I have not really a clue what it is… 😉
In short: White Hat SEO means using legitimate techniques that keep Google happy. Black hat SEO means using techniques that manipulate Google in some way in order to increase traffic.
Black hat techniques will always exist, however over time they are being used less and less due to the penalties Google are giving out.
Hey! Quick question that’s totally off topic. Do you know how to make your site mobile friendly? My weblog looks weird when browsing from my iphone4. I’m trying
to find a template or plugin that might be able to fix this problem.
If you have any suggestions, please share.
With thanks!
If you are using WordPress, check out WPTouch. That will instantly add support for mobile devices.