In this edition of the Affiliate Buzz, host and Instructor of the Affiliate Marketers BootCamp, James Martell is joined by his wife Arlene Martell. In this episode, they talk about how a Google Manual SPAM Action penalty was removed from a student’s website.

Beginning the episode, James speaks to Arlene about the flexibility she enjoys from owning her own business. Arlene was recently able to fit her work around having a great morning making birthday cards with her grandchildren.

The Changing Rules of Google Algorithms

James recounts the recent changes Google has applied to its search ranking algorithms. These have included the Penguin and Panda updates which have now been amalgamated. For some people this has changed their site’s page rank for a variety of reasons, not always for the best.

Sometimes James and Arlene receive emails from their students asking for help and on one such occasion there was an email directly connected to this problem. The subject of the email was: Please Help Google Applied Manual Spam Action To My Site.

Re: Please Help. Google Applied Manual SPAM Action to My Site

Hi James, I need your help desperately. I received the attached email from Google and have not been able to figure out how to resolve this. I've posted it in the School's facebook page but got conflicting advice from what I've found through my own research. So out of frustration and fear that I may really mess things up, I decided to send you a quick message to get your advice.

Basically, Google has applied a manual spam action to my site. To be honest, I'm not even really sure what that means. My site has been built by the book. I've always followed your advice and done things right. I don't spam, I don't participate in link exchanging, I don't list my site on any link farm type sights. No games at all.

First, I was advised to go back and add nofollow tags to all of my affiliate links on my site. This way the spiders will not follow my affiliate links off to my merchants and will not flag my site as an artificial or unnaturally linked site.

Second, I was advised to replace all of the affiliate links of my landing pages with a link to a secondary page that contains more "detail" of the product, and have that page contain my affiliate links. The thinking is that Google will see visitors clicking through to another page on my site before leaving vs landing on my site and clicking through to my merchant.

Do either of these sound like a good way to resolve this?

When Google applies the Manual Spam Action, they’re essentially removing the site from their index. This can be a scary prospect for the website owner.

James and Arlene have had this happen twice. Once was in 2001 and the other was in 2004. James says he always worries when it comes to December 27 as both cases happened on this date.

However, unlike in the old days, receiving this notice is not a death sentence for the website. Previously a manual spam action meant the only solution would be to start over. This is why some affiliate marketers would give up.

James thinks Google’s change in policy allowing website owners to adjust their sites to have these penalties removed is a positive step forward. After all we all make mistakes and sometimes their webmaster guidelines can be vague. For instance the exact definition of a link sharing scheme is not concrete. Google has also caught some web owners out with a change in their rules.

A Student With A Problem

Continuing on with this student’s predicament; James and Arlene discuss the email he received. In it Google informed the student that his site was to have a penalty imposed. Google specifically stated they had found artificial or unnatural outbound links on his website.