Google’s John Mueller said he was generally in favor to the idea of giving prior notice to receiving a manual action, but he said “it’s challenging.” John then explains that Google’s search algorithm try to reward sites, while also negating any benefit any spam may have – but not demote. But that may have dodged the specific question provided.
The question was asked by Vlad Melnic on LinkedIn who asked:
Given how drastically manual actions can impact revenue and operations, what are the odds that warnings might be implemented in the future, before an action is delivered/taken?
A week’s notice to get things fixed before removing a domain entirely from SERPs does not seem unreasonable, especially given how this can impact dozens, maybe hundreds of people working there.
The most recent expansion site reputation abuse policy had zero notice prior to its expansion. Whereas when it was first introduced, Google gave a full two months of notice prior to enforcing it. So why didn’t Google give any notice about expanding the policy?
John Mueller of Google responded to Vlad Melnic’s question saying:
That’s a good & hard question. Generally, I’m in favor, but it’s challenging… If we do these to improve the quality of the search results (the goal is not to penalize sites but rather to improve results), then it would be strange to purposely leave the results bad for a week. Also, often our hope is to neutralize the problem (eg, for links: to ignore the bad links in our systems), so it’s rarely going to be the case that fixing the issue (eg, removing bad links that artificially affected a site) will result in a site staying in the same place in search.
John did add later, “Anyway, I’m totally open for suggestions! Maybe there’s a middle ground that could work somehow & be useful for all sides.”
The thing is, the question was specific to “manual actions” but it seems maybe John replied to it as if it was an algorithmic question? Or maybe I am misunderstanding?
One of the examples given by John Mueller was when Penguoin 4.0 was launched, it no longer demoted but rather devalued (just didn’t count those bad links).
But I don’t think manual actions work that way, at least not for most. Like the site reputation abuse penalty, wiped out those pages from the index completely.
In any event, I found it super weird that Google didn’t give a month or two heads up that the policy for the site reputation abuse spam policy was being updated to included first-party involvement or content oversight. It was a huge change to the policy and affected a ton of publishers. Ultimately, I guess it doesn’t matter – those publishers would have to drop that content anyway, or Google would for them months later. But any contractual agreements those companies had with those third parties, could have been worked out over the warning period.
Here is a screenshot of the thread:
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.