You work hard on your site. You do all the things those so call SEO experts tell you to do. You finally start getting some traffic from Google them BAM! Without warning or notice your precious Google traffic goes away.

You spend hours and even days, heck sometimes even weeks trying to figure out what you did wrong. You are convinced that Google’s spam team has given you a manual smack down but how do you really know? Until recently all you could do for the most part is speculate.

But Google has launched something new.

All Hail The Google Gods!

If you log into your webmaster tools account which if you forgot for some reason is located at www.google.com/webmasters/tools and then select the site (assuming you have more than one website) that you are sure got the Google manual smack down from your list of websites.

Now from the site’s dashboard (to the left) look under the main tab called SEARCH TRAFFIC. Now go down to the link that says MANUAL ACTIONS (see image below)

If you really did get a smackdown from the Google spam team with a manual action they are going to notify you here about what that was you were nailed for. It could be anything from selling links, shitty quality content. One guy got a message that said “thin content with little or no added value”

This site appears to contain a significant percentage of low-quality or shallow pages which do no profile users with much added value such as thin affiliate pages, cookie-cutter sites, doorway pages, automatically generate content or copied content.

In other words, the Google spam team felt his site was just an affiliate spam site. Another guy got nailed for what they felt was UN-natural linking. In other words, they busted his ass for buying backlinks. Naughty naughty!

So now you can know for sure what’s going on with the manual spam actions and if you’ve fixed whatever issue they have nailed you for, you can easily just click the reconsider button but BEWARE — make sure you’ve actually put forth the effort to fix whatever annoyed them in the first place it things could get even worse for you.