Niche Site Lady asked about lifting Google’s manual penalties for spam.
She mentioned that despite complying with all of Google’s requirements, her requests were still being denied, and she was considering drastic measures due to her frustration.
Here are the suggestions and tips provided by SEOs:
- Marie Haynes suggested creating Google Docs with screenshots of analytics to demonstrate the site’s usefulness and sharing plans for creating original and insightful content. She emphasized the challenge of convincing the webspam team if the site’s primary purpose is profit-oriented.
- Tim Wells mentioned a video by @indexsy where the individual unpublished every post on their site, Far & Away, in an attempt to have the penalty removed.
- Ghostblogger shared their experience of deleting all posts and implementing a permanent page redirect to the homepage, resulting in the penalty being lifted within 24 hours, although the site still struggled to fully recover.
- Stellar SEO recommended adding new content to the site and allowing some time, suggesting that publishing new content can sometimes help lift the penalty.
- Cash expressed surprise that Niche Site Lady’s site received a penalty, noting its usefulness for trip planning.
- Google Search Honesty asked if Niche Site Lady had checked her EEAT, implying that improving these aspects could be beneficial.
- Lyndon NA suggested that sometimes penalties serve as a learning experience, recommending noindexing or deleting a portion of the site based on the severity of the violation.
- LinkBoss noted the challenge of lifting penalties following recent Google updates, mentioning that they hadn’t seen any successful recoveries yet.
- Arpiet K Malpani referred to a post by @iannuttall that supposedly demonstrates how to lift a manual penalty.
- Tom Ward advised considering obtaining a new domain and starting afresh, potentially repurposing old content but avoiding public actions.
- Neeraj Mishra shared that out of five sites he attempted to have penalties lifted for, only one was approved, which was a 10-year-old brand.
- New Story Studio mentioned success through completely rebuilding their site, submitting multiple applications, and providing a clear explanation.
- Dennis Melnik achieved success by removing unnecessary content from his site, leaving only essential facts, which resulted in the removal of the manual penalty.
Fili Wiese stated that reconsideration requests that won’t be approved:
— Reaching out before the problem was fixed
— Reaching out WHILE you’re working on fixing the problem
— Being aggressive or agitated in the response
— Saying Google doesn’t know how to do their job
— Demanding that Google explains itself
— Saying “we changed our H1s,” etc.
— Saying “but it’s fully indexed on Bing”
— Saying “my other 50 sites weren’t penalized yet,” which leads them to look into your other sites
— Saying you’ll sue Google (sorry, it’s their index, you have little to no rights)
When Google’s web spam team evaluates potential spam, they consider intent – if they determine the intent is egregious enough (high intent to spam), they’ll issue manual actions.
The team has ways to identify spam patterns at scale, and they internally justify and document exactly why they issued a penalty.
Google also assigns a different web spam employee to handle the reconsideration request from the person who originally issued the manual action.
