It’s the bane of every SEO’s job to find offending backlinks and identify pages that caused a Google penalty. However, it’s a necessary evil because failing to clear away components that seem spammy will damage companies’ internet marketing performances. In recent updates, Google pointed webmasters in the right direction, leaving it up to individual SEOs to do the heavy lifting.
Although the do-it-yourself approach was reiterated by Google’s Search Engineer Matt Cutts in a recent Webmaster Help Channel video, the revered SEO official has come back with news that it might all be over soon.
“We are going to, over time, give more and more information in those messages,” Cutts said in the video.
However, he explains these examples and messages apply to notifications in the Webmaster Tools console. Domains that have been hit by algorithms do not receive individual messages and won’t be provided examples.
“If you log into the Webmaster Tools console and you see a message, that means that there has been a manual action by someone on the Webmaster team that is impacting the ranking of your website … some messages have example links,” Cutts explained.
So what can webmasters expect? While Google isn’t going to put the answers directly in their hands, it will point them in the right direction, he stated. The messages will contain a few example links, but they won’t list every single offending link if there are hundreds or thousands because that will take up too much storage. Rather, marketers will see between one and four example links that provide them with enough information to tackle bigger search engine marketing issues.
