About a week ago, we reported that Google began enforcing its new site reputation abuse policy by issuing manual actions and ranking penalties for those sites that violated those policies. Google seems to be now lifting some of those manual actions where the sites took the necessary action and no longer are violating the policy.
Glenn Gabe has access to some sites's Search Console properties where he had examples of sites hit by the site reputation policy penalty and then saw those penalties reversed after submitting a reconsideration request.
Glenn posted the example on X and wrote, "Quick update on "Site reputation abuse" manual actions. Some manual actions have already been lifted. Those sites handled their coupons subdomains or directories via noindexing (or nuking of content there)."
He added, "And very interesting to see visibility surge back for some (as Google still needs to see all of the noindexed urls and remove from the index). i.e. The urls still indexed can rank even though they are being noindexed (just because Google hasn't recrawled those urls yet). That will change soon..."
Here is the screenshot he shared showing the site no longer has a manual action:
He also shared examples of a site that "slipped through the cracks" and didn't get hit by the manual action and probably should have:
BTW, here's a site that never dropped (must have slipped through the cracks when manual actions were sent out). But, they noindexed the coupons directory recently anyway. The site actually surges when others drop out due to manual actions. But again, that content is noindexed… pic.twitter.com/6lz8umfeBl
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 11, 2024
Either way, once you are hit by this, and you get the manual action lifted, those directories are no longer going to rank in the future.
Forum discussion at X.
