Site Reputation Abuse policy changes that lead to manual actions for publishers abusing their reputation requires publishers to provide sufficient evidence of change of editorial processes. And as Google has said in recent addition of FAQs to the policy – affected publishers have to noindex the policy abusing content and thereafter submit the request for lifting of manual action.
And on the manual action page Google recommends this.
Which is essentially just noindexing the policy violating content and submitting the request for lifting of the manual action.
But that’s not enough actually enough to get the manual action lifted.
Earlier today I posted this on X.
This not my current client, I just on boarded them last week to help with site reputation abuse manual action!
They have no indexed all the subfolers (3) for which they got the manual action last month, they fixed (noindexed 3 violating subfolders) around 27 Nov and submitted request for lifting of action – provided enough info around what they did and explained everything around why manual action should be lifted now.
But web spam rejected the request and mentioned that “editorial practices” change significant evidence wasn’t provided. But at the same time, the site reputation abuse manual action recommended actions (screenshot above) doesn’t say anything about this. It just says to noindex the affected content.
But I guess that broad editorial policy change is something that Google’s spam team is also looking at because for this publisher when request was submitted only affected pages were noindexed but editorial policy pages still say have information around some content being managed by …… PTY LTD (third party which is reason for penalty) which is a product reviewing & testing agency!
Probably web spam looked at that and might have guessed that same content may come back and want this publisher to at least get rid of this from editorial policy pages, if not actually cut off the business relation with that external provider.
Let’s see if what happens when I submit the request again, after updating the site at broad level to reflect that there is significant editorial change which suggests that the ties between third parties are cut off now and those third parties will no longer be publishing the content on the site.
If your submitting a request for lifting of a manual action for site reputation abuse, I also suggest you to do same and of course first onindexing of affected pages is a must!
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