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Google launched their manual action viewer back in August of 2013. The question was, would Google show manual actions dating back years before that, if the manual action still existed?
The answer is yes.
I asked Google's John Mueller this on Google+. I wrote:
The Google Manual Action viewer launched in August 2013, would it have shown manual actions received prior to the launch (if they still existed), let's say dating back to 2012?
John responded, yes it would. He said:
sure, if there's a manual action, it'll be shown.
So I guess even manual actions dating back to 2010 or so, would be shown, if they still existed.
Forum discussion at Google+.
Comments:
Dave Fogel
05/30/2014 12:45 pm
I thought we just talked about manual actions expiring?
Barry Schwartz
05/30/2014 12:47 pm
They expire, but if you do not do anything to correct it, they return weeks later.
Dave Fogel
05/30/2014 12:48 pm
If they don't come back, does that mean they are lifted or is your site still being penalized and now you have no way to fix it?
Barry Schwartz
05/30/2014 12:50 pm
If they do not come back, then you are good.
Adam Heaton
05/30/2014 04:04 pm
I'm not sure how true this is. A client of mine had a manual penalty message through, but once they rolled out the viewer there was no manual penalty in there. I asked about this on the webmasters forum and got no answers, so not sure what was up, but thought I'd mention it anyway.