Time for an update. I lost one of my sites completely out of the Google index on Decemb er 3 or so during the great Plugrush massacre to the "sneaky redirects" manual action. I discovered it about a week later. For reference I'm concluding this post by quoting my first post in this thread from early December, but the TL;DR is "Old blog, ultra clean, had a Plugrush widget for plugs-trading only, never used mobile redirects."
What I did next was to file a long, polite, well-written good-English reconsideration request with Google, explaining that my site is clean, that I was aware PlugRush was a problem for many webmasters because of mobile redirects, but that I never used that "feature" and as far as I could tell after careful study neither my PlugRush widget nor anything else on my site was redirecting anybody, sneakily or not. Sadly I did not keep a copy of the request to share here.
Filed that on December 11. Today my site is back in the index. There's a January 7 (yesterday) machine generated response to my reconsideration request in Webmaster Tools, with the money paragraph being:
Quote:
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Previously the webspam team had taken action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this action.
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Note well: I was stubborn and filed my reconsideration request WITHOUT REMOVING MY PLUGRUSH WIDGET.
My takeaway on this is that Google was indeed cheesed off by the Plugrush mobile redirects (which makes perfect sense) but that they turned the dial a little too far to the left and accidentally banned a bunch of sites showing Plugrush code that wasn't doing the redirects. As far as I know, I'm the first person to report getting the manual action lifted while
retaining non-redirecting Plugrush widgets. I thought people would like to know that it can happen.
My post from earlier in this thread, for details and reference:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Forkbeard
Here's a data point. I've got a 10-year-old blog that's ultra clean, no redirects, popups, automated traffic trades, or anything sleazier than old-fashioned manual link exchanges. Advertising is affiliate links, JuicyAds banners for years, and (starting fairly recently, maybe a year?) one little block of 4 plugs from PlugRush.
Had a surfer notice I was vanished from the index, asked me what was up. I checked, and sure enough, the search for "blog name" that used to return at #1 no longer returns at all in the first 10 pages.
Logged into Webmaster Tools, checked the Manual Actions page. Sure enough, I've got a sitewide "Cloaking and/or Sneaky Redirects" manual action listed. Ouch!
My PlugRush is supposed to have mobile redirects disabled (they've never made any sense to me, why would you piss off a daily repeat visitor you could advertise to yourself for years by sending him forcibly away the first time he gets on the internet on his shiny new smartphone?) so I logged in and checked. Mobile redirects box is unchecked for that adzone, as it should be.
So. I have Plugrush on my site, I never used mobile redirects, I got the sitewide cloaking/sneaky-redirects manual action, and I don't know why. (When I "Fetch as Google" using mobile useragents, everything looks fine.)
Is this enough to point the finger at Plugrush? No. But I gotta be suspicious. I suppose it could be JuicyAds, but I trust Jay quite a bit more than I do the unknown-to-me Plugrush guys. (And no, I never sold my mobile traffic to Juicy, either.)
So, no conclusions. But I'm throwing this data point out for the benefit of anybody else who is trying to figure out the pattern based on accounts in this thread and elsewhere.
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