Penalty Check

Penalty & Manual Action Check — Phase 20

Executive Summary

A Google penalty is a multiplier against zero — no amount of on-page optimization, content creation, or link building can overcome an active manual action or severe algorithmic penalty. Run this phase FIRST in Wave 1. In 2025, penalties have expanded beyond traditional link spam: Google's Scaled Content Abuse policy (March 2024) specifically targets bulk AI-generated pages without human editorial oversight, and Site Reputation Abuse (May 2024) penalizes sites hosting low-quality third-party content for ranking purposes. Additionally, algorithmic penalties from the Helpful Content System (HCS, integrated March 2024) are not marked in GSC — they require traffic pattern analysis correlated against known update dates. Penalty status also directly affects AI visibility: penalized or low-trust domains are excluded from Google AI Overviews and are rarely cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity.

2025 penalty benchmarks:

• Manual action recovery: 2–8 weeks after reinclusion request (Google states 2–4 weeks; reality: 4–8 weeks)
• Algorithmic recovery: must wait for next Core Update to take effect — typically 3–6 month cycles
• HCS recovery: documented cases show 3–12 months after removing unhelpful content
• Disavow threshold (2024 guidance): Google auto-ignores most low-quality links — only disavow if confirmed manual action or +500% spam spike
• TF:CF ratio 10% = automatic disavow candidate. Run free check at Majestic.com. Effort: 20 min. Priority: 20 (4×5).

1. Check competitor clean profiles — compare client's organic traffic trend (SimilarWeb) against 2–3 confirmed-clean competitors in same niche to establish "what healthy looks like." Effort: 15 min.

Short-Term (Week 1–2)

1. Audit thin/duplicate content — run Screaming Frog crawl (free up to 500 pages) → filter for pages 50 programmatic pages (location × service combinations) with near-identical content: flag immediately. Google's March 2024 Spam Update specifically targets this pattern. Effort: 30 min.
2. Submit disavow file if needed — only if manual action confirmed OR TF:CF 10% of link profile | Ahrefs anchor report |

| Referring domains from .ru/.cn spam | >5% of RD count | Ahrefs + GSC | | Links from same C-class IPs | >20 links from same /24 subnet | Majestic | | Trust Flow 2× sitemap count) site:domain.com -www → www/non-www duplicate check site:domain.com inurl:? → Parameterized duplicate pages being indexed "[business name]" -site:domain.com → Scraped copies of content cache:domain.com → Last crawl date and cached content domain.com spam → External spam reports domain.com penalized → Community penalty reports

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## Step 7: Competitor Clean Profile Benchmark

Compare the target site's signals against confirmed-clean competitor sites. This establishes what a healthy local business looks like in this niche.

**Tools:** SimilarWeb (traffic trends), Ahrefs (referring domains, anchor distribution), Majestic (TF:CF), Screaming Frog (indexed count)

| Signal | Client | Top Competitor | 2nd Competitor | Healthy Benchmark |
|--------|--------|----------------|----------------|-------------------|
| Organic traffic trend (6mo) | ±% | ±% | ±% | Stable or growing |
| Referring domains (total) | # | # | # | Industry average |
| TF:CF ratio | ratio | ratio | ratio | ≥0.5 healthy; 0.3, 10% | 2–4 months | Build disavow file; earn natural links | 20 (4×5) |

### Rank-Specific Competitor Benchmark Table

Compare client vs. top-3 competitors at specific rank positions:

| Metric | Client | #1 Ranked Competitor | #2 Ranked Competitor | #3 Ranked Competitor | Healthy Benchmark |
|--------|--------|---------------------|---------------------|---------------------|------------------|
| Manual actions | Y/N | Y/N | Y/N | Y/N | None |
| Organic traffic trend (6mo) | ↑/↓ % | ↑/↓ % | ↑/↓ % | ↑/↓ % | Stable or ↑ |
| TF:CF ratio (Majestic) | ratio | ratio | ratio | ratio | ≥0.5 |
| Exact-match anchors | % | % | % | % | <10% |
| Indexed pages vs. sitemap | ratio | n/a | n/a | n/a | Within 20% |
| GBP rating (trust proxy) | stars | stars | stars | stars | ≥4.0 |
| INP (Core Web Vital) | ms | ms | ms | ms | <200ms Good |
| E-E-A-T: expert bylines | Y/N | Y/N | Y/N | Y/N | Present on all |

## Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

- **Author:** [mshahiddigital](https://github.com/mshahiddigital)
- **Source:** [mshahiddigital/agentic-local-seo-audit](https://github.com/mshahiddigital/agentic-local-seo-audit)
- **License:** MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.