Story by
Emil Protalinski
Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, incl Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, including Ars Technica, Neowin, TechSpot, ZDNet, and CNET. Stay in touch via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Google today introduced a new feature to help webmasters see if their sites are affected by a manual webspam action for violations of the company’s quality guidelines. Called the manual action viewer, the new addition shows information about actions taken by the manual webspam team that directly affect that site’s ranking in Google’s search results.
To try it out, you’ll need to sign in to Google’s Webmaster Tools and hit the “Manual Actions” link under the “Search Traffic” section. Here’s what it looks like if Google has taken manual action on a specific section of a site for “User-generated spam”:
Google’s says less than 2 percent of domains in its index are manually removed for webspam. If your site is in this group, Google has already notified you in Webmaster Tools, but now you can also perform a manual check against the company’s internal webspam systems.
Google is taking questions about the new tool here.
Top Image Credit: Alexander Sperl
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.