- Feb 28, 2019
- 7,452
- 7,913
Google issued a manual action penalty to sites.google.com. This is not restricted to a few sites but all of them regardless of whether they have any links or blackhat content received a penalty. The penalty is site-wide due to recent Google Sites spam using sub-domains. They couldn't take down specific sites, so they gave a penalty to all of them.

The learn more link leads to this page
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175#third-party-spam
It's clearly indicates abuse of Google properties by users. The penalty was given to Google by Google. This could be a temporary penalty until Google finds a solution. In worst case, Google could reduce the authority of Google sites which will impact everyone. As of now, some Google Sites are still ranking on first page. So, the penalty only reduces rankings to some extent. I don't think if we can do anything about it. Let's see if Google manually goes through millions of review requests or removes the penalty within a few days.

The learn more link leads to this page
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175#third-party-spam
It's clearly indicates abuse of Google properties by users. The penalty was given to Google by Google. This could be a temporary penalty until Google finds a solution. In worst case, Google could reduce the authority of Google sites which will impact everyone. As of now, some Google Sites are still ranking on first page. So, the penalty only reduces rankings to some extent. I don't think if we can do anything about it. Let's see if Google manually goes through millions of review requests or removes the penalty within a few days.
