Google’s Manual Review – How To Find If Your Site Has Been Reviewed

What is the Google Manual Review?

The Google Manual Review is a feature from Google whereby a team of quality raters (humans) will review your site and determine whether it’s following Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. In a nutshell, it is designed to help improve the search process for all users.

There are currently two schools of thought on how this works –

1. The quality raters will not directly impact search rankings. Instead, they report back to Google’s Engineers, who alter the algorithm to make it more effective.
2. If a quality rater deems that your website is aiming to unethically manipulate the search results via ‘black hat techniques’ they can directly penalise your website with a Manual Action.

We will delve into this further over the coming weeks, so please stay tuned.

How To Find Out If Your Site Has Been Reviewed

Here are some simple steps to check if your site has been manually reviewed by Google:

1. Login to your Google Analytics account
2. Select: Audience > Overview from the left hand menu
3. Click on the ‘Add Segment’ button above the table of data, which will look like this –
4. Click on the red button ‘+ New Segment’
5. Click on ‘Conditions’ under ‘Advanced’ on the left hand menu
6. Fill out the table exactly as per below –
7. Click ‘Save’

You will then see a screen that looks like this –

You should also see a symbol next to the ‘Audience Overview’ heading in the top left corner. If the symbol is yellow your website is being reviewed / sampled.

It is likely that you will not see any data within the graph and the symbol is green. This means that your site has not been manually reviewed (or is currently being reviewed) within the selected timeframe.

Google will rarely review your website, if at all, although if you expand the selected timeframe you are more likely to see a manual review, which will look like this –

What Items Has Google Manually Reviewed?

After you locate the times that Google has manually reviewed your website, you can drill down and identify what items they are looking at.

Firstly, update your selected date range to a specific time that Google has manually reviewed your website. From the left hand menu, select – Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages.

This process will allow you to identify what items Google is including within it’s manual review.

What To Do With This Data?

If you’re following white hat SEO techniques, a Google Manual Review should be nothing to worry about. However, you may want to take some time and double-check for your own peace of mind.

Visit Google’s webmaster quality guidelines and skim read over the document to locate the items that Google has manually reviewed on your website. Try to understand what Google is looking for and double-check that your techniques are within their guidelines.

In a nutshell, if you focus on the user first and foremost, rather than trying to manipulate your website to gain rankings on Google, it should be happy days.

 Want to Know More?

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