Unnatural links warnings - what if you don't have webmaster tools?

[Dr.Marie]

Let's say you own a site and don't have Google webmaster tools installed. Your traffic plummets and you want to know if you have received a manual warning from Google. If you set up webmaster tools will the warning be in there?

Anyone know?

(Forget the complication of the latest link warnings potentially being bogus...I just want to know if you can still see a warning if you install webmaster tools *after* the warnings were given out.)

[jsteele823]

I've never seen one post-facto.

I know that adding a user after the fact does not allow them to see old messages.

[Belfast]

I've never seen one post-facto.

I know that adding a user after the fact does not allow them to see old messages.

Thanks, good to know.

I wonder if they'll change it now though - to help new site owners to "not necessarily... need to worry...".

[gazzahk]

Unnatural links warnings - what if you don't have webmaster tools?

You are stuffed... I would imagine the amount of websites that use webmaster tools is tiny. Add to this those people that set it up but never use it and I would imagine the total people that ever get the message would be less than 1 or 2 % of websites...

[SEO_AM]

I just checked my WMT Messages and about cried... there was a high priority message waiting for me. Much to my relief it was another major problem that have no penalties involved.

Googlebot attempted to access my hompage 85 times yesterday (crawls me a lot I guess) without success. They list a bunch of potential causes... None fit my environment. I ran a Google Fetch and Googlebot did not have a problem following that command, i.e. the site is accessible by Googlebot.

I hate shadows of problems... Anyone ever have Googlebot not being able to access and just have the problem go away?

[ozzyr]

I hate shadows of problems... Anyone ever have Googlebot not being able to access and just have the problem go away?

this happened to me a long time ago when my server went down for a few minutes but i guess it was when the bot wanted to see it. i don't think it tried 85 times, though, mr. popular!

[SEO_AM]

Google did not give a time or anything else. I guess we will have to go through the logs for the full day to find out what was happening when Googlebot came to visit. The only thing I can think of is to see if our server was overloaded at those times. We had no indication of any problems at all. The site was up all day with no down time.

[Dr.Marie]

I just checked my WMT Messages and about cried...

Ugh. That sucks. When I went to my WMT I had one message and I could feel my heart rate rising...but it turned out I had a domain with an outdated WP install. That was a nice surprise and easy to fix.

I have had messages in WMT in the past about a possible outage with my site. In my case though, it looks like I did have some server downtime.

Hope you get things sorted out!

[kicker]

Let's say you own a site and don't have Google webmaster tools installed. Your traffic plummets and you want to know if you have received a manual warning from Google. If you set up webmaster tools will the warning be in there?

Anyone know?

(Forget the complication of the latest link warnings potentially being bogus...I just want to know if you can still see a warning if you install webmaster tools *after* the warnings were given out.)

I believe once Google spider has scrolled the site they will send you a warning if they detect anything wrong with the site.

[jsteele823]

I believe once Google spider has scrolled the site they will send you a warning if they detect anything wrong with the site.

The question is not what they do when you have Webmaster Tools, but rather what they do when you do not have it.

In other words - where would they send a warning, if no one has registered as the owner of the site?