Can someone that had (or seen) a Manual Action in WMTs tell me.....

[PaddyDisplays]

This is a repost of this question http://moz.com/community/q/manual-action-found-in-wmts-no-email-no-message-in-wmts

But I'm sure there is someone in the moz fourms that have had/seen manual action

Someone I know said that they were looking though their WMTs and under Manual Actions they found they had a partial penalty.  There is no date against it and they never got an email and there are no messages WMTs for it.  I haven't personally dealt with a Manual penalty before, but I would have expected there to be a message in WMTs for it ( an email might have been missed because of a spam filter etc).   Could it be a very old penalty?

[TomRayner]

Hi there

I think you're inkling is correct, this would be an old penalty.

The manual action tab is relatively new, coming up to just a year old this month.  Both myself and some agency buddies have seen sites that have had penalties in there when previously the site owner (and sometimes even the agency!) did not think there was a penalty.

If you have Webmaster Tools set up, you should always receive a message whenever manual action has been taken (bar a system error).  However, in the past, for example, you may not have had WMT set up when a penalty has been applied, or you didn't have access to the account then. Therefore, the message would not be there for you to read, due to it not being sent or deleted.  However, the manual action tab will show any penalties that the site has, regardless of when it was applied, when WMT was set up, or if a message was sent or not.

Therefore, if you're seeing a penalty notice in the tab but no message was received, I believe that means it would be an old penalty - as a new one would have also sent a message as well.

Hope that all makes sense.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hey Paddy Displays!

Sounds like an older penalty to me. I would highly suggest creating an email filter for @google.com so that future emails from WMT or other G related services won't go into spam. Just to play it safe!!

[PaddyDisplays]

Thanks for confirming that.

As its a old partial penalty, and from a quick look at their analytics I can't see any main pages that have been penalised , is it best to leave it alone ( in the short term at least)?