I woke up Saturday morning to emails from Google Webmaster Tools stating that I had been hit with a manual penalty for Thin Content on a number of sites.
As I scrolled through the emails trying to get a gauge on what was happening, I was having mixed emotions. One was that I’ve popped my cherry, and was now a real man! The other was disappointment and frustration with Google for being so heavy handed.
5 Sites Had Been Hit
One of them was a genuine site that had a lot of work put into it and had some valuable content. This I was most upset about. It was not a big earner, but it did make a few hundred bucks a month on some Amazon products that I use and recommend. I had put a lot of effort into the posts and had some good natural rankings.
Two were domains that had gone dormant so decided to test two plugins that pull in product data from Amazon and another from ClickBank. These were technically using scraped data so I can see the violation with Google’s terms.
These are basically considered auto site builders. My recommendation with these are to steer clear of this type of plugin. Certain forums are littered with this kind software making bold claims. They are a piece of crap and just kill your sites and don’t rank for shit. Automatically pulling in affiliate links and scraped copy automatically gets you nothing. It is not a quick way to make millions as they claim!
The fourth was a blog I started last summer. I wanted to document my weight loss progress when I decided to get healthy after the birth of my son, through change of diet. It was more a personal journey, and I used it as motivation for myself more than anything else.
Unfortunately it was one of the sites that got hacked which I wrote about earlier in the year, so I had lost most of the content. The only page I could salvage was the first blog post. It never ranked for anything and was never intended to. The only reason for it to be given a manual penalty is that there is now only one page of content present. That doesn’t seem fair.
Finally, my web hosting review site that I set up to either expose poor quality web-hosting services, or promote the good independent ones I discovered, was also slapped with a penalty. It only had 3 pages including a homepage – one positive and one negative review. All were very genuine posts with full speed tests and copies of email dialog showing the poor IT support. I just never had time to add to it. Other than being a small site, it had done nothing wrong.
So What Can I Conclude From This
Well the first is all the sites were on the same Google Webmaster Tools account. They had all been started as legitimate sites, except the two that I changed tact and decided to test auto-content generation plugins. So I had no reason to try and “hide” them. They were not part of any private blog network and had no link building activity taking place.
The second thing I noticed, is that all the domains that were penalised had some sort of EMD. My sites or client sites that had brand names or non-EMD names were left well alone by Google.
What drew their attention to me I am unsure. It is either the extra publicity I got from doing the “Tiered Link case study” on Matthew Woodward’s site a couple of months back and Google sent someone in to check me out, or they found one of my auto sites on their index that had a footprint which brought them in for a closer look.
Either way I got hit.
Moving Forward
My own personal recommendations now would be to never add sites to a working GWT account that are in anyway breaking or intend to break Google guidelines. No matter how harmless you may think it is. My mistake was keeping them in the account after they turned from legitimate websites to test cases.
If you decide to change the direction of a site that in anyway makes it suspect, remove it at once.
The fact that Google hit all sites in the account with anything that looked remotely like an EMD means they are not giving sites the benefit of the doubt, even if they are genuine. If anyone read my diet blog, they would see it was a real diary, but it became guilty through association. Same with the web hosting blog.
Because most of my online marketing is legitimate, I am not paranoid and don’t do much to cover my tracks. When I do go “black hat”, I set a up standalone web hosting account and keep it isolated from my real work. Ironically none of this was hit with any penalties.
Now, after this, it has changed my attitude and I have seen how quickly Google can come in a take down a lot of hard work even when the infringements are very minor and are not manipulating search engine results.
If you do need to use GWT, my recommendation is to not more than one black hat site per account for obvious reasons.
Submitting For A Reconsideration Request
I have been thinking about this all weekend and wondering what I should do. There were only a handful of articles that were ranking and that I was disappointed in loosing. So I may just bring the content over to a longer term blog and kill the original site. The rest I don’t know. I could remove the auto content, go back to the original content they were designed for and see what happens.
Either way I am not that bothered, nor do I expect them to be reinstated without considerable work, which I am not willing to do.
I’ll update this post if anything happens.
If you’ve been hit by a Google manual penalty please let me know what happened.
Sean Jenkins says
August 5, 2014 at 9:21 pmHey Nick,
It’s very sad to hear but you’re not the only one that got hit, I hear that lately google is hitting up even PBN sites and they’re becoming quite aggressive with it just like you said. Even sites that are sitting on the border of spam/legit are not given the benefit of doubt and are being thrown out.
Do you think the fact that you had all the sites on the same WMT account caused that?
Would you advise opening a separate WMT account for each site from now on?
admin says
August 5, 2014 at 9:46 pmHi Sean, thanks for stopping by again. I don’t have too much experience with the manual penalty stuff, but it definitely feels like a Google all out offensive. The fact they pay people to do this kind of work means they must be aware of the shortcomings with their algorithm.
I had about 20 sites on the one account. All were fully legit client sites or personal ones. 5 got penalised. No sites held elsewhere did. So it was either the GWT or GA that linked them up.
If you feel have to use GWT and you are breaking Google guidelines then definitely create standalone accounts (I am tempted to say use proxies too) otherwise it will be a dominos effect I am afraid.
I am trying to get out of the bad habit of using all of Google tools, and for example, use plugins like Slim Stat http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-slimstat/ for onboard analytics instead.
Nick
Sean says
August 5, 2014 at 10:16 pmThanks for the answer Nick,
But what exactly do you mean when you say “break google’s terms of service”, black hat spammy sites?! You said it yourself that some of the sites that were penalized were legit sites.
admin says
August 5, 2014 at 10:26 pmTo simplify, my suggestion would be if you are doing any “black hat spammy sites” then keep them well away from each other.
Hefe says
August 5, 2014 at 10:26 pmHi Nick,
Sorry for your pain, but thanks for sharing. I had a site get slapped with a manual “pure spam” penalty recently. It was a nice expired domain that I had experimented with by adding some half-spun articles that were targeting some buying keywords (it never ranked for anything).
I noticed the penalty when I attempted to start over with this domain as a brand new, legit site with all original content, added it to Webmaster tools and then realized it was not indexing – nor was Google crawling it at all. I finally checked the penalty box in GWT in there and saw the “pure spam” notice.
I think you could say it was thin content, but “pure spam” seemed excessive. Nevertheless, it was in my Webmaster account and now I’m afraid that account is compromised and anything else I add to it will be suspect. Why wouldn’t it be? The other sites I have in it are 100% legit and were not affected, but they’re probably on thin ice and can’t be man-handled link-wise.
On a related note, I checked the indexing on the rest of my PBN and found that 5 other sites had been de-indexed at some point in the last year. They had the same kind of half-spun content that was targeting niche related keywords. A few were on the same Adwords account, but none were on GWT. I’m guessing if I added them to GWT, it would tell me the same thing: pure spam manual penalty.
The lessons I’m learning from this (and your experience) is unique content and hardcore, silo-ed separation of church and state.
admin says
August 7, 2014 at 10:11 amHi Hefe,
Thanks for your detailed response. Very interesting to read. Sorry about your PBN. I too was concerned about the compromising of legitimate sites on my GWT. I have begun a clean up and removed other old sites. That said all other sites are ranking well and I am grateful for that.
As for half-spun content, it only works as a temporary solution for contextual linking and never ranks in my experience. Google tends to de-index low quality content very quickly these days. Just look at the lifespan of GSA SER links. There may or may not be a manual penalty or just an algo one on your sites. I guess you can take away that if you take the time to build a PBN, do it properly with original content. Even if you outsource it.
Best,
Nick
Doped says
August 8, 2014 at 7:28 amSup Nick,
Nice write up, dont really have much to contribute nor say,
Buh just one question tho. How do you organize all your domains,
passwords, bookmark, e.t.c. i can hardly keep anything organized
nor properly arrange and i have only a handfull of blogs and webhost.
Thanks
admin says
August 8, 2014 at 9:57 amHi Man,
One word, spreadsheets. Just get a copy of excel or open office if you don’t already. I try and have everything in one book, with a tab for each section, like hosting, registrars, affiliate accounts, etc.
Hope this helps.
Nick
reg says
August 29, 2014 at 10:43 amI am beginning to dislike google more and more as a policeman whos cornered the SE market and so they have full control over everything.
YOUR QUOTE: “If anyone read my diet blog, they would see it was a real diary, but it became guilty through association. Same with the web hosting blog.”
I had an adsense website. I wrote 50 pages of content. I had one accidentally go with just a draft on a published post. For some reason I had left it and gone away and came back to find my adsense suspended for the one page. I have some suspicions that it was reported by a reader also as I have seen other sites with very thin content offering adsense advertising.
I told google on appeal that the draft had completely been finished. — dissallowed
I asked google adsense support for ideas — ideas implemented — again dissallowed on appeal to restore the adsense.
I deleted the offending URL — again dissallowed on appeal.
I checked the stats and each time only the offending page was visited. On the last occassion the reviewer at google still clicked the old offending link and then dissallowed me. They didnt read anything else of the site.
Now, 50 pages isnt a huge scrape if it were. This is genuine writing by me and its been categorised as a scrape. Its an EMD ALSO. I had no other affiliates on the site.
So wheres the value? they claim theres no reader value. Hey I am writing my own words and collating available info which is extremely scattered and referring people to here or there and making appropriate comments thats the value – but they see it as scraping.
admin says
August 29, 2014 at 11:42 amHi Reg,
That’s terrible. Especially if you spent all that time writing content.
I also do not like the reconsideration process. It reeks of bias. EMD’s are high risk IMO and I am moving away from them.
Thanks for sharing.
Nick
reg says
August 29, 2014 at 10:51 amI use statcounter.com for my stats. Just for those that have been HIT BY ANYTHING dished out by Google, the dilemma of what to do… but theres some advantages of using GWT like Spencer Hawes post – getting the blog deindexed and starting again with the same content on a new domain after his case study got negative SEO’d. I see Spencers Disavow still hadnt kicked 9 months later. Dissavow sounds like a big load of garbage. http://www.nichepursuits.com/survival-knife-project-update-making-a-comeback-from-negative-seo/ or another https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalty-site-move-18163.html
Brendon says
August 29, 2014 at 3:26 pmHey there Nick,
Sorry to hear about your penalty.
I curious though, does the skin care site you did a spam case study on Matthew Woodward’s blog is still ranking?
Brendon
admin says
August 29, 2014 at 3:52 pmHi Brendon.
Yes, ironically it’s fine and still doing very well.
How are your sites doing?
Nick
Brendon J says
August 29, 2014 at 4:28 pmHey Nick,
My link building is more conservative and I mostly try to limit the number of links I need in order to rank. I do that by using high pr links from my PBN.
But I read that case study on Matthew’s Blog, re-read it again, and suddenly something struck me.
You mentioned that putting up the website took you only a day of work and that it’s now bringing in about 1K monthly.
I suddenly realized that this is an amazing ROI to have in terms of time and money invested (especially time).
Are you rinse and repeating this process with other niche sites as well and are you having good success rate with ranking these spam sites?
admin says
September 2, 2014 at 9:23 amHi Brendon,
Yes, its a good ROI on time for that site, but it just offsets the time spent on less fruitful projects.
I keep churning out sites as often as I can. Some win and some don’t. I am constantly changing things and trying new methods and tactics.
Nick
karl says
September 22, 2016 at 10:45 amRecently we have buyed a expired domain. After publish the new content we see that the site appears in bing but not in google. We have founded a pure spam penalty at GWT. After review it the boys from google say us that the site still contain spam… but the site is new. I think only with a lot of rich content they can change its review. The new projects will be in another GWT account preferably created in another ip