Last week, in light of the massive amount of manual web spam actions that Google enacted, I wrote an article that took a closer look at what was behind some of the actions. This week, let’s hear what Matt Cutts has to say about the differences between a Google algorithmic penalty and a Google manual web spam action. What does the Google web spam team consider an unnatural link and what can you do to recover from it?
March is proving to be an eventful month. According to Fruition.net, on March 7th, many website owners received “manual web spam” notices from Google for unnatural inbound links. Then, there was the announcement that Ann Smarty’s site MyBlogGuest.com was penalized and de-indexed by Google. Then, we started hearing of other sites that were penalized as well. Ann Smarty even modified the update on her blog to confirm that some member sites were hit by Google as well.
Hopefully, if you’re reading this, you haven’t been affected by the recent Google algorithm updates. Unfortuately, my site did fall victim to the recent updates. In May, I was hit by Penguin 2.0. In mid-June, I was hit by the spam query update and in late June, I was hit again by the massive update that was rolled out June 25th. I’m currently waiting for a response from the Google Webspam team regarding my Google Penalty Reconsideration Request. Meanwhile, what can you do to prevent this from happening to you?