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Manual Penalties from Google

Gayle Rogers

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Sep 3, 2013
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Gayle
We have a dealer site that has received a manual penalty yesterday from Google that is limiting their visibility in search. Not a total de-index, but not good. Here is the penalty info:

Thin content with little or no added value

This site appears to contain a significant percentage of low-quality or shallow pages which do not provide users with much added value (such as thin affiliate pages, cookie-cutter sites, doorway pages, automatically generated content, or copied content).

We are certainly not participating in any of the above mentioned activities, so we are a little perplexed.

After some research we also found that several other dealers in GST (about 50) received a similar penalty.

That said, check your sites...
Here are a few things you should do:
  1. Google search the brand name to make sure you are still in the results.
  2. Check Google Search Console for Manual Penalty
  3. Check the link profile in the search console...Not sure this is related at this point, but we did see competitive dealers linking to our dealer...A lot of links. They are all on the same platform, and it has been reported to them. If they are linking to us...we are probably linking to them and others.
I've never seen a manual penalty on a website I directly worked with, so if anyone else has ever dealt with this before, I would love to hear your thoughts.

I'll try to keep you guys updated as we learn more about the what, where and why.

UPDATE #1: All the sites we have found to have been penalized are in the Gulf States Toyota Footprint.

UPDATE #2: We think it could be shared new vehicle inventory, so we have removed that and are resubmitting to Google for review.

UPDATE #3: Re-submission denied.
 
Last edited:
  1. Check the link profile in the search console...Not sure this is related at this point, but we did see competitive dealers linking to our dealer...A lot of links. They are all on the same platform, and it has been reported to them. If they are linking to us...we are probably linking to them and others.

Whoa.. what?
Your vendor is adding backlinks between clients to help build SEO traction?
 
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✨ AI Highlights

A dealer's website received a Google manual penalty for "thin content with little or no added value," and the poster discovered that approximately 50 other dealers in the same geographic service territory received identical penalties, suggesting a systemic issue rather than individual site problems. Investigation revealed that a vendor platform was creating cross-linking schemes between its dealer clients to artificially boost SEO, which appears to be the likely cause of the coordinated penalties. The key insight is that dealers should audit their vendor relationships and backlink profiles, as third-party SEO tactics can trigger manual penalties affecting entire networks of sites.

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