Google Manual Actions: Frequently asked questions and their answers

For webmasters affected by a manual action, understanding why a particular penalty is applied, what the consequences are and how to adequately address the issue are key to resolving a potentially critical situation.

When penalties are discussed, some questions seem to come up more often than others. In this Q&A, which is a supplement to The Ultimate Guide to Google Penalties, I’ll include the questions I’ve heard asked most frequently, along with actionable answers.

Experience shows that manual penalties are infrequently issued, and only for serious offenses. Human errors in the process, while not impossible, are extremely rare. It is reasonable to assume that once a penalty has been triggered, it is not a false positive. As far as Google Webmaster Guidelines go, an actual violation was confirmed.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

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About The Author

Kaspar Szymanski

Kaspar Szymanski is a founding member of SearchBrothers.com and well-known Google Search expert specializing in recovering websites from Google penalties and helping websites improve their rankings with SEO Consulting. Before founding SearchBrothers.com, Kaspar was part of the Google Search Quality team where he was the driving force behind global web spam tackling initiatives and the public face spearheading Google webmaster outreach and communication efforts.