I’ll be honest, I am still confused on this. The other day, I reported on how an ex-Googler who worked in the web spam team, said that every manual action must be acted on or else the site will soon be penalized and have a negative ranking applied to it.

I honestly thought before I wrote that post that some manual actions do not lead to negative rankings. I wrote, “I tried to look back at an example of a manual action notification that I thought did not impact the site, but maybe…”

So then I spotted this comment in a Google+ thread from Google’s John Mueller not saying that. He said:

I bolded the “you don’t need to take action” part, because you don’t.

So we have a Googler and an ex-Googler suggesting two different things. So John came back in and said, “I’d recommend watching Matt’s video on that specific type of manual action, he covers some corner-cases that make things a bit clearer.”

So it seems John is implying that Kaspar is not wrong, because he is referencing corner-cases. However, I cannot find that specific video with the corner-case mention.

In short, it seems clearly that not ALL manual web spam notifications require an action from a webmaster. Meaning, not all notifications related to web spam are negatively impacting your site.

Or maybe, Google isn’t counting some links, so removing the links won’t have a negative or positive impact anyway.

See, I am confused.

Here is the video, it isn’t 100% clear what to do here:

Forum discussion at Google+ and hat tip to +John E Lincoln.