Google Can Penalize A Network of Websites With Same Manual Actions

Most of these days, businesses operate with multiple websites for various natural reasons. The chances are that if you are also running a network of websites, and even one of the websites gets a manual action, then the rest of your websites can also get the same.

John Muller on Twitter answers for the same when asked by a user. He said, “It’s certainly possible — if they’re built the same way, then it would be reasonable to apply the same manual action.”

In the discussion, the site owner gets the thin content (automatically generated content) penalty on all of its websites. Therefore, he wanted to clarify whether it was because of content on each website or because it was a network of websites that were built similarly.

Here’s the question posted by Ori Zilbershtein on Twitter.

Was wondering if they got it because of the sites being a network owned by the same company or that it really has to do with the particular content on each of these sites, as the sites been rebuilt, rewritten, rebranded but still under manual action of ‘thin content’. 2/2

— 𓂀 Ori Zilbershtein (@OriZilbershtein) January 26, 2021

And, to this, John Muller replied:

It’s certainly possible — if they’re built the same way, then it would be reasonable to apply the same manual action. That said, it sounds like it would be more useful to discuss the specifics, ideally with folks who have dealt with similar issues before, eg, in the forums.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 26, 2021

If you don’t know what manual actions are, then here it is as per Google documentations.

What is a manual action?

Google issues warnings against a website when a human reviewer at Google find that pages on that website are not compliant with its Webmaster quality guidelines. As per Google, most manual actions addresses websites that are following unholy activities (black hat SEO) to manipulate their search index.

Google usually sends manual action warnings to webmasters via Google Search Console, and if you get one, it is certainly not a good thing for your SEO efforts. After a manual action, you may see lower rankings or your site getting utterly invisible in the SERPs.

Key Takeaways

After following the Twitter thread, here are some key takeaways from this news:

• Try not to create a network of websites by getting a different web hosting and verifying each domain using a separate account
• Don’t interlink heavily on your network of websites as it sends a strong signal to Google
• Even if you have to create a network of websites, follow the best policies suggested by Google Webmaster guidelines to avoid manual actions

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