Google has a new blog post today, announcing that webmasters that repeatedly violate the Google webmaster guidelines could see their sites on the receiving end of “further action” being taken on the site.

It isn’t uncommon for many SEOs to see sites pop up and down in the search results, and often the reason is a manual action.  But if you have seen a site seemingly repeatedly being penalized and then back ranking again in a cycle, they could end up being targeted by Google’s answer for repeat spammers.

Who is this targeting?

Google is targeting webmasters who are abusing the reconsideration request process.  If you aren’t spamming and haven’t had to file several successful reconsideration requests, you don’t have anything to worry about.

Also, this isn’t targeting the website owner who may have had to file multiple reconsideration requests to see a single manual action lifted from the site.  This is instead targeting those who abuse the process as a spam technique.

Link sellers and not buyers?

One thing that is left unclear in Google’s blog post is whether they are just targeting link sellers, as their example is the case of a link seller, or if it applies to all types of manual actions, including inbound links.

From their blog post:

For example, a webmaster who received a Manual Action notification based on an unnatural link to another site may nofollow the link, submit a reconsideration request, then, after successfully being reconsidered, delete the nofollow for the link.

Also, it makes more sense that they are going after those who have the links on their own sites.  Other than the possibility of sites being hacked, these are generally decisions undertaken by the webmaster or someone on the webmaster’s team.  So it couldn’t be triggered through SEO where someone points a ton of bad quality and/or paid links to a site repeatedly in hopes of the competitor getting harsher action taken.

Other types of manual actions?

But Google doesn’t make it exactly clear if all types repeated of manual actions can trigger this or if it is only for those selling links – but actions on the webmasters own site could definitely be used in order to ensure it is the webmaster doing it and not a competitor, like had happen with inbound links.

On the one hand, it would be nice to cover all angles of the webmaster guideline violations, but they don’t neccessarily want to send webmasters into a panic about something a competitor could do to them that could result in this “further action”.   So I could see them limiting to violations that are clearly done by the webmasters, with the possible exception of clear PBNs (private blog networks).

Repeated violations

If you have only violated the guidelines once before, you likely have nothing to worry about.  This announcement seems to be specifically targeting those webmasters who are abusing the reconsideration request process to continue spamming despite being previously caught.

Such repeated violations may make a successful reconsideration process more difficult to achieve. Especially when the repeated violation is done with a clear intention to spam, further action may be taken on the site.

In order to avoid such situations, we recommend that webmasters avoid violating our Webmaster Guidelines, let alone repeating it.

Why make this change?

It also implies that there is likely a lag between a successful reconsideration request and the time it takes for Google to crawl a site, process the fact that the nofollows have been removed, and put a new manual action penalty on the site.  So this cycle could still be profitable, especially if the webmaster keeps a “clean” version of the site to quickly switch to and file the reconsideration request when it gets hit with manual action yet again.

Repeated cycles of this manual action to reconsideration request also ties up Google’s resources as well, especially when they see a site doing this repeatedly.

Should SEO agencies worry?

The idea of an SEO agency being the recipient of this kind of penalty for SEO they do on clients is definitely an interesting one.  After all, we have seen cases where Google takes action on an SEO company based on the work they have done for clients.

iAcquire was famously removed from the Google search index after it was revealed they were buying mass links for clients.  And that is just one example that we are aware of.  So while rare, it does happen.

I also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some SEO agencies are doing this as a major marketing strategy or using it to build their own private network they use to link to clients.

If Google did penalize SEO agencies for repeated spam tactics where they are doing this reconsideration request cycle as a marketing technique, it could make things especially interesting.  However, it is often easy for SEO companies to switch company names or domain names, as we saw when TopSEOs was penalized by Google.

“Further action”

While Google doesn’t detail exactly what the “further action” might be, whether it would likely mean either a permanent removal, or perhaps a longer term one before the site could get back into the index.  Having a six month or year long period of being deindexed could solve the immediate repeated reconsideration request issues, but also leave some wiggle room for an unsuspecting webmaster who might purchase the domain name without fully researching and identifying a previous spam issue.

There is also the possibility that Google won’t do prolonged removals, but merely see in indexed but ranking for nothing.

That said, there have been many reported cases where webmasters have had their sites deindexed seemingly permanently, or for a set period of time.  But this announcement could make it more official as well as make more webmasters aware that if they continue to spam that they could see further action taken.

Will webmasters receive a new warning?

Another thing that is unclear is if there will be a new alert that shows up in Google Search Console.  For those who might be dealing with the cleanup aspect of this type of “action”, it would certainly be helpful to know if they have been impacted by repeated spam issues.

But Google might just repeatedly decline subsequent reconsideration requests after a site has hit that “repeated violation” threshold.

Hopefully we will see some more information about this coming out, as the announcement did seem to leave more questions than answers.

Here is the full blog post:

In order to protect the quality of our search results, we take automated and manual actions against sites that violate our Webmaster Guidelines. When your site has a manual action taken, you can confirm in the [Manual Actions] page in Search Console which part of your site the action was taken and why. After fixing the site, you can send a reconsideration request to Google. Many webmasters are getting their manual action revoked by going through the process.

However, some sites violate the Webmaster Guidelines repeatedly after successfully going through the reconsideration process. For example, a webmaster who received a Manual Action notification based on an unnatural link to another site may nofollow the link, submit a reconsideration request, then, after successfully being reconsidered, delete the nofollow for the link. Such repeated violations may make a successful reconsideration process more difficult to achieve. Especially when the repeated violation is done with a clear intention to spam, further action may be taken on the site.

In order to avoid such situations, we recommend that webmasters avoid violating our Webmaster Guidelines, let alone repeating it. We, the Search Quality Team, will continue to protect users by removing spam from our search results.

Posted by Google Search Quality Team