Manual Review / Manual Penalty does it exist?

[seofish]

Does manual review or manual penalty really does exist in GOOGLE WORLD?

Dispite some people said it does and some does not, what is your opinion? - If some of your keywords is drop so far down (certain keyword) they often said you got Manual Review or Manualy Penalty for this

Is this FAKE or FACT?

[tedster]

Fact. Many penalties that Google imposes start out as manual and then once they have a good handle on it, they automate so it can scale. It is my understanding that the algo "flags" a domain that matches some heuristic that they've established - and then the flags get a human look.

Then there's also the human editorial patent [webmasterworld.com] that's been around since at least 2006 - and the army of paid human reviewers who manually check rankings. It's been rumored to be over 10,000 strong, and they are trained in spotting things that Google doesn't want to see ranking.

[Planet13]

@tedster

Then there's also the human editorial patent [webmasterworld.com] that's been around since at least 2006 - and the army of paid human reviewers who manually check rankings. It's been rumored to be over 10,000 strong, and they are trained in spotting things that Google doesn't want to see ranking.

Don't doubt you for a moment, tedster. But with all that manpower, why, or why, do spam sites still rank so well?

I mean, when you think about it, for every spammer, there must be at least several web masters who are upset by the spammer and are reporting them to google, right? So they must be getting lots of outside help as well, right?

Plus you have caffeine which should give google the horsepower to run more and more sites / pages though their algorithms, right?

Plus the info from the google toolbar, and people are more than happy to help google verify and clarify the data they are collecting by using webmaster tools and google analytics. So people are doing everything they can to make their web sites EASIER for google to crawl and understand, which SHOULD make google's life easier, right?

I mean, how hard could it be to write a script that says, "If a web site gets Ten Thousand links from forum posts and profiles in a period of 24 hours, maybe we shouldn't rank it first until we've had a chance to look at it,"?

[tedster]

It is a bit of a mystery, isn't it. However, the "army of 10,000" essentially reviews the domains in the specific SERPs that they are assigned, and most often that is results for the really big query terms.

By the way, at Pubcon Matt Cutts acknowledged that more spam was getting through than they like (especially in Local) and hinted that a new initiative was coming. Another clean-up of bogus backlinks is also in the near future.

[indyank]

By the way, at Pubcon Matt Cutts acknowledged that more spam was getting through than they like (especially in Local) and hinted that a new initiative was coming. Another clean-up of bogus backlinks is also in the near future.

oh my god...though i do appreciate his acknowledgment of spam getting through and their willingness to do something to prevent it, I am more scared about the undesirable outcome to genuine sites, as there are more bugs in whatever they do these days.

Probably they need to give more time to their testing teams and also remain alert to reports on things that break! The issue with indexing (or whatever it is) is one such example.

[brinked]

what I am seeing is more spam in the top ten, and keyword domains ranking higher than they should. Glad to see they notice the same thing and plan to take action.

[Planet13]

what I am seeing is more spam in the top ten, and keyword domains ranking higher than they should.

Exactly what MayDay was supposed to eliminate!

[Planet13]

By the way, at Pubcon Matt Cutts acknowledged that more spam was getting through than they like (especially in Local) and hinted that a new initiative was coming.

I think I remember a quote like that in an interview with Eric Enge back in March (?) of this year?

Matt Cutts sounded quite vague, and I think he said something like, "...it MIGHT be driven by user input..."

It is sort of a dilemma for google, isn't it? They like to keep their methods hidden from spammers, but if you need user input, then you will have to basically promote it so people will know about it.

[Dave_Hybrid]

Seeing something very odd this w/end.

A rise from 50 to 3000 visits a day from mountain view/google in analytics, which doesn't track bots.

A rise from around 1 minute to 3 minutes for avg time on site.

All mountain view traffic has an average of over 9 minutes time on site, more than 9x the usual site average.

This city sent 10,965 visits via 10,232 landing pages - last 3 days.

Money keywords up this weekend. Higher ranking than ever.

Seems like a massive manual review, the site has nearly 1 million pages so that may explain why im being so deeply assessed.

I just hope they like what they see, never seen a review like this, very very thorough.