Manual SEO Penalty - how long until it happens and any connection to Adsense?

[paladin]

Hello everyone,
I'll try and keep this as general as possible.... a large site with many pages indexed in Google (over 1 million) made a change by adding a single affiliate link to the pages that were cached. The same link, location and text was used in all pages. The text was something along the lines of "Find out more details". These same pages have multiple Adsense units. Its important to note that the Adsense units were not changed, just an additional text link added to the pages. These pages have been up for several years without issue.

About 24 hours after the change was made the site owner got an email from Google stating that the site was manually penalized due to thin content.

So the questions comes up: Did Google see a decrease in Adsense clicks, manually reviewed the pages and issued that notice?

Or was the timing too short and the two just a harsh coincidence?

[zehrila]

This might have a correlation, there might actually be thin content on your site and since your site has millions of pages and you made a site wide change, this must have triggered a manual check which led to a manual penalty. It is probably time to cleanup the site, dig up your analytical tools and start weeding out pages that are not bringing in any traffic, but if any of those pages have good backlinks pointing to them, then it is best to improve content in those pages.

Please remember, manual penalties are easier to remove as you know there is a person who is going to look into the changes that you make and respond back whenever you send the reconsideration request. Good luck.

[aristotle]

If the site deserves to be demoted because of thin content, then why didn't google's algoritrhm demote it a long time ago?

[tangor]

In ever the search for the buck when changes are made to an existing, perhaps allowed as "evergreen" site will certainly generate a new look.

Beware breaking what ain't broke.

I've had this happen on sites with page counts numbered in hundreds, not million(s).... There was a base change in the OP's original site. Oddly enough, re: sites I managed, those sites had NO adsense on them, but inserting an affiliate link promoted a "look". Go figure.

[aristotle]

the site owner got an email from Google stating that the site was manually penalized due to thin content.

Why didn't google's algorithm notice this thin content years ago, and demote the site then?

[EditorialGuy]

Why didn't google's algorithm notice this thin content years ago, and demote the site then?

Why bring up apples when we're discussing oranges? The OP is talking about a manual penalty.

[aristotle]

the site owner got an email from Google stating that the site was manually penalized due to thin content.

If google's algorithm demotes other sites for thin content, as is generally scknowledged, why didn't it demote this one? The answer to this question might very well provide a clue as to how google's algortthm determines which sites to demote.