John

  Google has added a whole new set of manual action penalties for violating Google News and Google Discover guidelines. This notes the first-ever time a site could get a manual action penalty for contravening Google News and Google Discover policies. Earlier, the search engine only restricted manual actions to contraventions of Google Search. However, that doesn’t imply Google has not been imposing its guidelines around News and Discover. Of course, it has. But up until now, these impositions were automated, whereas now they will be manual. The difference is that unlike an automated penalty, a human reviewer at Google issues a manual penalty after they ascertain that a particular website is not in compliance with the search engine’s guidelines. Customarily, a manual penalty leads to the websites or pages being ranked lower in the search results or excluded entirely from the SERPs. Although, it is uncertain what the consequences will be when a website gets slapped with a manual pena...

Backlinks are undoubtedly one of the most important ranking factors, and this contributes to the typical feeling of uncertainty that encompasses the management of backlinks. Skip the discussion over the morality of obtaining backlinks. What about getting rid of them? Should SEO professionals bother about disavowing links? Contrary to some topics, Google has been quite open about their views on disavowing backlinks and its place in your SEO toolkit. Why Disavow Links? Google prescribes to use link disavowal in one case – to address penalties charged against your website. If you receive an ”unnatural links” message in your Webmaster Tools from Google, it means the search engine is penalizing you whether or not you are consciously complicit. Being a webmaster involves addressing Google penalties as soon as they show up, and this should not be a problem if you stick to white hat  SEO . However, knowing how to maintain a clean backlink profile is crucial to your long-term SEO strategy. ...