Google Webmaster Tools just launched the Manual SPAM Action Viewer which alerts webmasters to manual SPAM issues with their sites. Like a good SEO consultant, I quickly ran through all of my clients and here are the various messages I encountered – ok, perhaps it’s not so “ultimate” – disavow me if you want:
Pure SPAM – Partial Match
Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
User-generated SPAM – Partial Match
Pages from this site appear to contain spammy user-generated content. The problematic content may appear on forum pages, guestbook pages, or user profiles.
Unnatural Links From Your Site – Site-Wide Match
Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
Unnatural Links To Your Site–Impacts Links – Partial Match
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.
Thin Content With Little or No Added Value – Partial Mach
This site appears to contain a significant percentage of low-quality or shallow pages which do not provide users with much added value (such as thin affiliate pages, cookie-cutter sites, doorway pages, automatically generated content, or copied content).
Other messages I haven’t seen listed in GWT Help:
Anyone seen any others?
BTW, if you’re a client reading this, don’t worry, we’ve already alerted you if there’s a problem.
9 Response Comments
There’s a thin content one that SEL showed in their announcement. Haven’t seen one myself yet, however.
Added. Thanks Steve.
The full list of categories/types is on a help page somewhere in Google support. I think.
Hey Andrew, can U add to each that ya find if they’re ‘site wide’ or ‘partial’ matches? Started a collection of my own, curious how that all plays out as well.
Will add link to yers in a bit here; http://seotrainingdojo.com/Blog/new-tool-finding-manual-penalties-from-google.html
There is another message out there for “Unnatural Links To Your Site” that impacts the whole domain, not just the links: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2700611?hl=en&ref_topic=2604771
I haven’t seen it on any of my client’s GWT yet. That’s fortunate as this is the really bad one.
I guess it couldn’t have hurt to check there first eh Matt?
@theGypsy #done
Thanks brother. Already added a link to this post.
What’s interesting, is that the 6 people that have shared the unnatural links ones with me, all had the ‘partial match’. This is the first time I have seen the ‘site wide’ for those. I really hadn’t considered the ULs to be partial to be honest. Enlightening indeed.
My mistake Dave. The Site-Wide Match actually was for Unnatural Links From Your Site. I had put it on the “to” your site message initially.