It has been a while since we reported on any wide spread, mass scale, Google manual actions but it seems like over the weekend, Google has issued mass manual actions over "Thin content with little or no added value."
It seems Google went after a content network and located many of the sites participating in this network and then slapping them with thin content manual actions. I do not have confirmation from Google but I received a couple notes about it over the weekend from anonymous sources and there are many threads in the various forums with people complaining about these thin content actions.
The largest thread I saw was in Black Hat World, there are actually several threads there, but this is the largest.
Here is a picture of a manual action one site received:
Some of these webmasters are saying:
There has been a rash of thin content site issues the past day and a half popping up from GWT. Seems Google is stepping up the game in that area.
Seems like a lot of people are getting these messages since the past few days. I lost a site last year and GWT message was: "Pure Spam". Although the site had around 200 articles and it was definitely not SPAM.
One anonymous webmaster wrote me:
So yesterday I saw two of my sites penalized with “thin content” while one of the website was a huge white hat experiment. I use professional copywriting services and was shocked to see this, my affiliate manager was shocked too.Then I go to my affiliate network forum and posted a thread and saw couple of other guys with the same penalties. One was having couple of hundred articles on his website. I saw his website, it was very decent.
It seems like most of the ones who are receiving this warning are saying they never used a content network. So maybe this is some sort of manual action bug?
I will reach out to Google to find out more, hopefully I will get a response.
Forum discussion at Black Hat World.
