Interesting Manual Action From Google From Negative SEO

ThopHayt

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So one of the sites I manage got slammed with some negative SEO. The site is a strong authority money site of mine. But what happened is actually pretty awesome.

Google gave me a manual action (scary shit to see), but they essentially said 'Hey, we notice some unnatural links going to your site but it looks like it might not be your doing so we are going to go ahead and ignore them for you.'

What does this mean? If your site is a high enough authority it looks like Google is more than capable of noticing the footprint of a negative SEO slam and simply ignores the bad links without need for the disavow tool.

Pretty cool stuff. Keep it up Google.
 
Cool! Could you share a bit more info on your domain - age, ref domains, metrics - just so we can see what Google considers authority enough to send out a manual message like that?

^ can you also include indexed pages
 
Cool! Could you share a bit more info on your domain - age, ref domains, metrics - just so we can see what Google considers authority enough to send out a manual message like that?

Sure, let me collect more info in the morning and I'll post in. That said, I cannot verify that it was the site's authority that caused Google to act the way it did... but I can't help but assume that the fact that the site is in good standing and free of spam had something to do with it. Were the site riddled with GSA blasts from day one then I'd imagine a spam negative SEO attack would have looked a lot more like an actual SEO attempt and incurred some other action. These are all guesses, but I am pleased with the outcome none the less.
 
So one of the sites I manage got slammed with some negative SEO. The site is a strong authority money site of mine. But what happened is actually pretty awesome.

Google gave me a manual action (scary shit to see), but they essentially said 'Hey, we notice some unnatural links going to your site but it looks like it might not be your doing so we are going to go ahead and ignore them for you.'

What does this mean? If your site is a high enough authority it looks like Google is more than capable of noticing the footprint of a negative SEO slam and simply ignores the bad links without need for the disavow tool.

Pretty cool stuff. Keep it up Google.

I can confirm, this happened to me about a year ago....
 
Damn, why this hasn't happened to me? :( I got slammed into abyss rankings :|
 
I keep saying this all day long if you have authority site you are pretty much immune to negative SEO. Especially if its 5 years + !!
 
Cool ! Really Interesting. Also I am waiting to see your site metrics.:D
 
Authority sites are immune to negative SEO. If it has age, lots of high trust flow backlinks from many different authority sites it's immune.
 
I think it was great gesture from Google towards your site...
All webmasters are not lucky like you...
 
So one of the sites I manage got slammed with some negative SEO. The site is a strong authority money site of mine. But what happened is actually pretty awesome.

Google gave me a manual action (scary shit to see), but they essentially said 'Hey, we notice some unnatural links going to your site but it looks like it might not be your doing so we are going to go ahead and ignore them for you.'

What does this mean? If your site is a high enough authority it looks like Google is more than capable of noticing the footprint of a negative SEO slam and simply ignores the bad links without need for the disavow tool.

Pretty cool stuff. Keep it up Google.
please just share the raw message as received
 
Very cool. Haven't heard of a notice like this before but good to see they're being proactive about identifying negative SEO. Looking forward to seeing the stats.
 
Nice. I guess if there is enough of a gap in the average overall quality of existing links compared to the neg SEO links then Google will recognise the fact.
 
Here is a redacted screen shot of the notification.


Manual_Action.png
 
I had one site slapped by first google penguin ... No, I didn't spam... It's just I sponsored a WP theme which got popular with my link in the footer.
And with latest penguin my other site got smacked for no reason but recovered in 2 days even better.

And I have a few competitors in top 3 getting spammed with porn links but google completely ignore those spammy links.
Conclusion? I agree with OP that google are not that stupid.
 
Well beyond age the fact that this site has A+ quality content on it probably does help.

But here is the things guys, I've done research and tests in negative SEO in the past and I don't think that this result is THAT rare. My study yielded the exact same results as this EXCEPT that I never got a manual notification on my test-site. Maybe that means that this was meaner negative SEO or my test site wasn't as good of authority, both are probably true.

But let you all learn three things from this lesson:

1. It pays to age your sites safely without spammy footprints.

2. It pays to have good content.

3. If you do these there seems to be more resistance to negative links.
 
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