Google's manual web spam actions
This new feature was released by Google on August 12th after a few days of delays and problems with implementing the feature. This is another in the long line of spam fighting features that Google has implemented over the past few years to get rid of spam results on its massively popular search engine, from Panda to Penguin and now Manual Webspam Actions. So who is this feature useful for? SEO consultants and internet marketing experts will love this feature as it makes finding spam that has a negative effect on a website’s ranking easily. This can include things like spam comments on an ecommerce site about products or posts on forums purely there to promote the users own website. If you log into your Google webmasters tools go to the ‘Manual Actions’ link under ‘Search Traffic’ and you will get to this new feature. There might be some action for you to take, but more than likely you will see ‘No manual webspam actions found’ if you see this then this feature won’t help you at the moment. However, this doesn’t mean you can just ignore this from now on especially if you have an area where users can create entries like a forum or comments box. If when you log in there are partial or site-wide matches this means that you are losing ranking because of these problems which are violations of Google’s quality guidelines. Partial matches are specific to a few pages or a section of the website. For example, a forum post that is advertising a site that has been spammed over your forum. Google will flag this up with something along the lines of ‘User generated spam’ and give you a little more information about it like location within your site and a description of what it is that is affecting your website. This is useful as you can go where the offending item is and remove any spam-like posts. Not only will this help improve your rankings but it will give your users a better spam free experience when visiting your website. Site-wide matches would be something that affects your whole site for example keyword bloating or unnatural links. Most website shouldn’t have anything under this category but, if you do, the description of the problem should give you an idea of what changes are needed. All fixed