Hi there! I’m happy to announce that I got the manual spam penalty from the big G removed.
But, I don’t know how. Or, I don’t know why Google removed the penalty. I also don’t know why I got the penalty in the first place. I was hoping that this would be an educational set of 2-4 blog posts about what happens when you get a Manual Penalty and How To Remove a Manual Penalty.
Unfortunately, this is just a “here’s what the heck happened, but I have NO idea why it happened” set of posts.
I was thinking I’d be able to give you more helpful information that this, but, this is all I got for you.
What I did to fix the problem was I went on Google Webmaster Forums and asked someone to look at this website and tell me what the heck I did wrong. Someone did. But they didn’t tell me what I’d done wrong to get the Spam penalty in the first place and then the feedback they gave me was very vague.
What I was hoping to get from the Webmaster Forum was, “This is what you did wrong, here’s how to fix it.”
Well, I made a few minor changes that I didn’t think mattered much. And I submitted a Reconsideration Request through my Google Search Console (a.k.a. Webmaster Tools).
Here’s what I can tell you: it took about 6-7 weeks to get a response and when I got the response, all I got was an email saying the Manual Spam Penalty has been Removed. And that’s it. No explanation. So I have no great insights to give you if this happens to your website.
While I’m stoked the Penalty was removed, as of the beginning of January 2019, this website is still not indexed in Google. If the website won’t reindex, then as far as I’m concerned, it still has some sort of penalty on it. But I don’t know, this might get fixed as well.
I’m going to go in to Search Console and ask Google to re-crawl the site and see what happens.
I’m glad that this is just a play site for me where I just blog about SEO stuff I like and not a website I depend on for a living income. Anyway, if you have any insights on to what happened, please let me know in the YouTube comments!
Thanks.
