Google has issued many manual actions from webmasters over the weekend. The search giant has given penalties to websites for having "unnatural outbound links" as their effort to manipulate Google's search results.
There are two main penalties webmaster can get from Google. First, a manual action from Google's spam team. Second, is an algorithmic penalty. A Google penalty is the negative impact on a website's search rankings based on updates to Google's search algorithms and/or manual review.
The cause for being penalized can be from anything that violates Google's Policy, webmasters guidelines, and not limited to blackhat SEO.
In this case, Google penalized the site by deciding not to trust any of the links on the website because it sees an unnatural pattern for link building. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of the site.
The email sent to these webmasters read:
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of your site. Actions that affect your whole site are listed under Site-wide matches. Actions that affect only part of your site and/or some incoming links to your site are listed under Partial matches."
Here is a screenshot picture from one of the many complaints, sent on Google support forums:
What Google did here, is to no longer trust any of the links from the affected sites. Most websites that are hit were blogs, and also many in the food, decor and craft related market areas.
Webmasters that have their websites affected, should log into their Google Search Console account and see the message. Google sent the message through notification, or any other means. If your site is affected, Google also gave an instruction on how to fix this issue.
While Google hasn't issued a statement, a lot of webmasters have reportedly received the messages in Search Console. Many of those websites use the same link strategy that in a more competitive or e-commerce market would have been labelled as spam.
Because the company is not including any sample URLs in the notification (not like it usually does when asking webmasters' manual actions), this has made some confusion among webmasters.
But what is already understood is that Google won't be trusting the links from these sites, which can have a negative ranking impact on the sites receiving these links. But that would not be a direct penalty for inbound links. Websites that are affected may have their ranks dropped, but Google doesn't state that it will be removing those sites from its index. The only impact given is about the loss of link trust from links on those affected websites.
