Thank you Google team
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| Manual penalty revoked |
As you know one of my site got a manual penalty and was deindexed by big G. This weekend I submitted a review request and early this morning found a response in my Google webmaster tool message box. The site has been reviewed and the manual penalty has been removed according to the review.
This leads me into thinking for good that it was victim of an individual - perhaps more than just one person, though - report. Let's say that you hate someone and that you want their site to be sent to the abysses of human knowledge. What do you do?
Use will use the spam page provided by Google and ask your friends to fill the form as well so as to make sure enough spam complaints are filed against that person you hate. Google has not penalized your site themselves but has put it somewhere between index and no man's land for the time needed to review it. However with the huge amount of spam reports they get everyday, if you don't take action, they won't act either.
That is my personal thought. I might be wrong, I might be right.
How Google dealt with a site infected with malware
But there is one thing I know for a fact and because I already experienced Google's quality services, they rarely penalize a site without motive or just because your face doesn't please their in-house team.
Years ago, one of my sites was hacked and trojans installed in it. I woke up one morning to an email from Google team letting me know that the site got a malware warning and was put on stand by for the time I fix things. I wasn't aware of anything so I quickly went to my Webmaster tool account and discovered the mess. There was a very detailed email from Google that would let me know what happened, what was the problem, provided me with a safe link to check out my own site - they weren't obliged to do so since it was my site - and instructions for me on how to solve this problem.
All in all and while my site was harmful, they were extremely helpful. Which is why this manual penalty made non sense for me when I saw it.
The old site problem was quickly fixed: I kept a backup of ALL my sites, asked my webhost for a nuke on my account and rebuilt all sites with the backups I kept (before doing so I made sure they weren't infected).
24 hours after the nuke, my site was back in Google's index.
Once again, they acted quickly. Ok I know that nowadays Google has changed their way to do business with small business owners, I know that they might not provide us with the rankings most of us deserve but I don't see the point for them to change their way of dealing with problems.
That is what makes me think that my site was more the victim of someone with bad intentions than from Google's Team.
And unless I'm proven otherwise, I do think they still consider a site infected with malware worse than a site that provides low quality info to readers. I mean what's the worse situation? A dangerous site or a site with nothing to share? Given the way they index spam sites, I still believe that malwares are their main preoccupation.
That is what makes me think that my site was reported by external people - certainly those I suspected from WOT.
However and because I care for my sites, I took measures in order to pass the review with flying colors - and I promise, I'll always keep a sharp eye on these measures for the time my sites will remain live:
- Checked all sites linking to mine
- Removed unrelated sites
- Disavowed spam sites
- Cleaned up my webmaster tools - strangely some .php pages were still indexed; which was a mistake
- Fixed all errors,
- Sent the site for review.
In this case it took only 4 days. And I want to thank you the Google team for having dealt with my case so fast.
Phew! It was a hard week. Now I'm going back to fill the site with valuable content, even more than before.
Posted by Holly Day
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