It was a bad weekend for European sites that were partaking in specific link networks with the intention of manipulating their rankings within Google. Google has sent out a boat load of link penalty notifications to all of these sites. On Twitter, Johannes Mehlem from Google said,
“We have taken action on one European and one German linking network.”
We have taken action on one European and one German linking network.
— Johannes Mehlem (@JohannesMehlem) August 18, 2014
The same Tweet was translated in Polish and posted on Twitter by Google’s Karolina Kruszyńska for Polish webmasters.
Dziś podjęliśmy działania przeciwko europejskiemu i niemieckiemu systemowi wymiany linków. http://t.co/VtQ82nSIgz #bettersearch — Karolina Kruszyńska (@karo_krus) August 18, 2014
The day before this news was officially confirmed, Gianluca Fiorelli from Spain notified Barry Schwartz of this information with the following tweet.
It seems that at midnight PCT (9am Spain) Google launched a massive amount of links manual penalization emails cc: @dr_pete @rustybrick
— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) August 17, 2014
It’s believed that those who were affected were all notified through Google Webmaster Tools, so if you want to be sure that you weren’t affected by these actions, it’s recommended that you check your manual actions viewer.