Unnatural links... how to tell if you have a manual penalty?

[kellyman]

Hi Guys

Is there anyway of knowing if a site has a manual penalty, without going through a reconsideration request

I cannot recall ever having a WMT warning on one of my sites but i cannot rank it, it has ranked in the past and very well, from 20k visitors per month down to 3k per month no warning, drop took place on January 15th there was no panda no penguin at that time.

Has anyone had a manual penalty but not been informed

Do i ask for a reconsideration just to see if there is any manual penalty or is that just suicide.

I have checked back in my Gmail account and cannot find any message that has been sent,



Thanks in advance

[carloborja]

I think if it is a manual penalty, you would definitely get a message/warning.

If it was a hit from the search engine algorithm refresh, that is the time you would not get any message. You will just drop in the results.

[Pandacide]

I agree with @carloborja. You'll get a message in WebMaster

[salvatorecapolupo]

There is no warrancy at all in my opinion: you could get a warning by mail, of course, but in general this is not a fixed rule. In some cases I got penalized for some keyword and saw that just in search results (i.e. from 12 position to 80 in just a day). In my experience manual penalties are in some cases notified when you resolve them (i.e. using disallow and nofollow)