Find Out If Your Website Is Manually Penalized By Google

This article was updated on September 5th, 2013 at 05:49 am

A question repeatedly asked at SEO forums is – “How to figure out if my website has got a manual penalty from Google?”. Looks like we have finally received an answer to this from Google.

Google Webmasters Tool will now tell you if your website have received a manual penalty from Google webspam team with its “Manual Action Viewer” feature . It shows information about actions taken by the manual webspam team that directly affect that site’s ranking in Google’s web search results.

Go to Google.com/webmasters > Search Traffic > Manual Actions

The tool is supposed to help you figure out what part of the website is the manual action affecting, what the problem is and how you can fix it. This will be in addition to all the notifications you’ll get from Google, in case of a manual action.

This tool will particularly be of help to those folks who have submitted reconsideration requests to Google and are awaiting a response. Even though manual action are very rare, this is a great effort from the Google webspam team to bring in some clarity to the classic “manual penalty or not” questions.