Traffic Triggers Manual Review?

[temp55]

I'm having discussion about this with my friend and we are both doing SEO.
Lately we discuss about what triggers site for manual review. According to him there is a list of niches that are manually checked by google employees. I mean niches that are sensitive, like payday loans, some weight loss, pills, hacks, forex, binary etc etc.
My opinion on this is that niche doesn't matter. Like If you have insane amount of traffic, but your SEO technique is a little bit dark you will still get caught, even if you write about cute dogs and cats.
I would like to know other peoples opinion on this, also if you have some experience you can kindly share...Tnx a lot guys.

 

[patriotnews]

It is 100% niche dependent.
I mean, everyone knows payday loans and the like are spammed like a beast. Try that same level of spam on something like "home improvement" and Google will spank your site before you hit page 1, let alone get traffic.
At the same time, I have seen niches where crazy levels of 301s are tolerated, but no spam or PBNs to be found...
I am currently in a niche where 75% of the sites rehash the same content amongst each other and provide backlinks to the site they get it from. No joke, I saw a site write an article, then a week later another site wrote about the same thing, and rehashed the content, including using the pictures and spending a lot of time just talking about the original article, and the original article will add a backlink out to that article sometimes. Then a week later another site posted, talking about the same thing, and linking to the 2nd! This will continue for awhile until 1 person, several months later will write a round-up post, and discuss several of the articles. These aren't PBNs or sites owned by the same people, these are all actual sites, run by actual people. It's crazy. BUT, try that level of reciprocal linking in a different niche, and you'll trigger penalties, and potentially a manual review.

So, yes, it is COMPLETELY niche dependent, and sometimes it has NOTHING to do with traffic, but once you rank high enough for traffic(pg 1), you also start being noticed by competitors, who can/will/do report your site and that can trigger a review.

So to answer your question: mud. It can be a lot of different factors. Personally, I don't worry about a manual review, because I spend so much time doing what I can to mimic, but 1 step better, my competition's backlinks that I won't stand out glaringly.

 

[temp55]

It is 100% niche dependent.
I mean, everyone knows payday loans and the like are spammed like a beast. Try that same level of spam on something like "home improvement" and Google will spank your site before you hit page 1, let alone get traffic.
At the same time, I have seen niches where crazy levels of 301s are tolerated, but no spam or PBNs to be found...
I am currently in a niche where 75% of the sites rehash the same content amongst each other and provide backlinks to the site they get it from. No joke, I saw a site write an article, then a week later another site wrote about the same thing, and rehashed the content, including using the pictures and spending a lot of time just talking about the original article, and the original article will add a backlink out to that article sometimes. Then a week later another site posted, talking about the same thing, and linking to the 2nd! This will continue for awhile until 1 person, several months later will write a round-up post, and discuss several of the articles. These aren't PBNs or sites owned by the same people, these are all actual sites, run by actual people. It's crazy. BUT, try that level of reciprocal linking in a different niche, and you'll trigger penalties, and potentially a manual review.

So, yes, it is COMPLETELY niche dependent, and sometimes it has NOTHING to do with traffic, but once you rank high enough for traffic(pg 1), you also start being noticed by competitors, who can/will/do report your site and that can trigger a review.

So to answer your question: mud. It can be a lot of different factors. Personally, I don't worry about a manual review, because I spend so much time doing what I can to mimic, but 1 step better, my competition's backlinks that I won't stand out glaringly.

TNX a lot mate, now things are much clearer...the problem is, for the keywords im chasing there is literally no competition but it has a lot A LOT of searches. Some of them are brand new keywords like 3-4 months old (usually product name) and have 120-200k searches which is insane.