{"id":1397,"date":"2016-04-11T21:32:13","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T21:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.serplogic.com\/?p=1397"},"modified":"2022-04-22T16:57:54","modified_gmt":"2022-04-22T16:57:54","slug":"google-manual-slap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/SERPLOGIC\/WP\/tutorials-case-studies\/google-manual-slap\/","title":{"rendered":"What To Do After Getting Hit With a Google Manual Slap"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is nothing worse than waking up, opening up your favorite rank tracking program, and seeing your rankings crash and burn. Seeing previous top three positions showing as N\/A is the worst feeling in the world. Then, you open up Google Webmaster Tools and see the dreaded message, alerting you that Google has assigned a manual penalty to your website.<\/p>\n

You are fucked. Your traffic disappears overnight and you are left in panic mode. People always say, \u201cOh, just stay calm and figure out a plan to remove the penalty.\u201d Yeah, that\u2019s easy for someone else to say, but the person that just got fucked by Google has just lost everything. No rankings means no traffic. No traffic means no sales. No sales means no revenue. No revenue means you better figure shit out FAST.<\/p>\n

Manual penalties are handed down by the thousand every week by an internal team. They have an entire manual team<\/a> that responds to requests submitted to them (basically tips from competitors that are too big of pussies to try to outrank) and also uncovers offenders after discovering a link network or one of the many \u201cprivate\u201d (I am saying this with a heavy dose of sarcasm<\/strong>) blog networks out there.<\/p>\n

You have to remember one thing about manual penalties: they are given out by real human beings. There isn\u2019t some algorithm that flags your website and then you get slapped. Someone is manually looking at your link profile and poking around on your website before they drop the hammer. Because of this, I would say that 99.9999999% of manual penalties are justified. They aren\u2019t just dishing them out to mess with you. You violated their guidelines and they are taking action. It\u2019s as black and white as that.<\/p>\n

So, when they slap your website you can be certain that they have very detailed notes on files as to why they assigned a manual penalty. They keep a record of why it was assigned and what date it was assigned. There is no avoiding the fact that removing the penalty will take time. It isn\u2019t going to go away overnight, and I will explain WHY in a moment. But first\u2026<\/p>\n

YOU MUST HAVE MULTIPLE SOURCES OF TRAFFIC!<\/h4>\n

Read that again.. and then again. Engrave this in your mind, because if you don\u2019t have other sources of traffic and you get hit with a manual penalty.. it’s game over. You aren\u2019t going to recover anytime soon. This is why you need to master social media<\/a>, PPC, guest blogging<\/a>, etc. Have as many traffic sources as possible!<\/p>\n

..ok, now back to WHY you will never get a manual penalty removed quickly. If you immediately submit a reconsider request they will look at the date it was assigned and deny it, because they know there is no way you could have performed what was necessary to fix the issue.<\/p>\n

Most of the time a manual penalty is tied to link schemes. Cleaning up a link profile is a very time consuming and tedious task. Trust me, Google is very aware of this. You have to first completely audit your link profile, attempt to get websites to remove the bad links, and then submit the rest in a disavow file.<\/p>\n

Warning:<\/span><\/strong> DO NOT just load up all the bad links into a disavow file and submit a reconsider request. This makes you look so guilty and Google is very unlikely to just remove the penalty under this situation.<\/p>\n

The manual penalty team wants to see you sweat. They want to see you work your ass off to try to fix the situation. They aren\u2019t going to hand you a removal on a silver platter without you putting in the work. I have no proof to back my thinking, but I would be willing to bet that any time a reconsideration request is submitted right after a penalty is handed out that Google notates the file, making it even more difficult in the future to ever get that penalty lifted.<\/p>\n

TL;DR:<\/strong><\/span> if you are too lazy to put in work, just scrap the site and start over. After a manual slap it\u2019s going to take a lot of work and even then there is no guarantee the penalty will ever be lifted.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Google_Slaps\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Steps to Take to Remove a Google Manual Slap<\/h2>\n

Anyone can do this. You don\u2019t need to hire an agency IF you have the time to dedicate to do it right. Most people don\u2019t have the time to do it and the reason that agencies charge thousands of dollars (with no success guarantee) is because it takes time. It takes a lot of time, actually. If a website has 10,000 links in their profile and thousands of internal pages think of how much manual work that is to go through everything with a magnifying glass.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Determine WHY your website was slapped<\/h3>\n

The most common manual penalties involve:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n