Software and app portal softonic.com has been on the receiving end of a manual action from Google, meaning the site’s visibility has taken a hit. As covered by Juan Gonzalez on the Sistrix site , there’s a sharp decline in visibility towards the end of May: The stats show a loss of visibility on various Google sites: Google US (-40%) UK (-33%) Germany (-42%) Italy (-61%) France (-53%) the Netherlands (-31%) Spain (-45%) and more… The major loss in visibility is for Softonics’s biggest directory, /s/ , which accounts for 40% of the entire domains visibility. The full list is here , but suffice to say it contains many of the site’s most popular downloadable assets.
Google has this week revealed its annual report on how it has policed the internet over the last 12 months.
A month ago, we reported that Google had issued warnings to bloggers over providing links in return for free products to review . Now it seems that the penalty actions reported over the weekend were directly related to Google’s warning last month. Google advised bloggers reviewing goods they’d received free of charge to nofollow any links pointing readers to sites where they can buy the products. As reported by SER , Google’s Webmaster Central Help Forum contains plenty of questions from bloggers who have received penalties over the weekend, like this one: The post by Sammi Penni in relation to the penalty notice shown above has been replied to by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google.
Since Panda 4.0 was rolled out early this week, there have been reports about which websites saw the greatest drop in rankings. According to the reports, eBay was one of the top Panda losers. [Update]: this article was amended to reflect that this breaking news is via a report from Re/code.
In a new video answer today from Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, he says that you can use the disavow tool even if you do not have a manual action. In which cases can you use this tool even without a manual action
Have user generated content on your site? Pay attention to what those users are doing. That’s the takeaway from Google hitting Mozilla with a spam penalty this week, along with another takeaway
How often does Google take “manual action” against websites for spam, where a human being reviews a site and decides it deserves some type of penalty? For the first time, Google’s released a chart showing this, going back nearly 10 years. The chart is part of Google’s new…