I paid $400 for a guest post on a tech blog and it got my site a manual penalty

3 comments

3 Comments

Oof, that's rough. I mean, a manual penalty is super serious, way worse than just a bad link. That usually means Google actually looked at it and saw something really wrong, like the whole post was just a hidden ad. Maybe the blog was already in trouble and you bought a link on a page they were already watching. I'd focus on trying to get that penalty removed before anything else.

margaretm231mo ago

Yeah, nothing like a real person at Google deciding your site is trash. Good times.

ross.kevin24d ago

Yeah I actually read something from a Google search guy a while back who said manual penalties are kind of like getting flagged by a real person after a complaint comes in. So its not just a bot catching you its someone actually looking at the page and going "yep this is crap." The hidden ad thing is real too I heard about a site that got hit because they were using affiliate links with no disclosure and the whole post was just product pushing with thin content. If your link was on a page like that you basically bought a ticket straight to the penalty box. Focus on cleaning that up first like iris said because nothing else matters if youre flagged.