Google has started enforcing its new site reputation abuse policy by issuing manual actions and ranking penalties to violating sites. However, Google is now lifting some of these manual actions for sites that have taken the necessary corrective measures and are no longer in violation of the policy.
Digital marketing expert, Glenn Gabe, has been monitoring some of these affected sites through Search Console properties. He has observed that sites penalized under the site reputation policy have had their penalties reversed after submitting a reconsideration request.
Gabe shared examples of sites that had their penalties lifted after handling their coupons subdomains or directories via noindexing or content removal. He noted that some sites saw their visibility surge back, as Google still needs to recrawl the noindexed URLs and remove them from the index. However, he warned that the URLs still indexed can rank even though they are being noindexed, until Google recrawls those URLs.
Gabe also highlighted a case where a site that should have been hit by the manual action "slipped through the cracks". Despite not receiving a penalty, the site noindexed the coupons directory. Interestingly, this site experienced a surge when others dropped out due to manual actions.
In conclusion, once a site is hit by a manual action under the site reputation abuse policy and gets the action lifted, the affected directories will no longer rank in the future.
