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What Is The Effect Of Falsely Submitting Google Search Console Errors As Fixed And The Fix Failing Repeatedly?

Basically, at my company, we have a web developer that we work with unfortunately they were put on as a sub domain of our by upper management. They constantly submit things as fixed to google when they are in fact not fixed.

Failed Fix #2 Failed Fix #3

For some errors they've submitted failed fixes up to 5 times. We've observed a traffic drop each time after the failure. Is this considered black hat SEO? What is the risk of us getting permanently banned if they continue to do these submissions? Does this cause a short term traffic boost?

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  • When you say that you observed traffic drop, traffic to what? The particular URL that was submitted or the site as a whole?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Mar 11, 2022 at 17:08
  • The site as a whole, both positioning drops, deindexing, less impressions and clicks, ibb.co/b7vfF9H The biggest drops were in the subdomain's pages which make up all but about 2000 of the pages.
    – GuyTryingToSolveAnIssue
    Commented Mar 11, 2022 at 17:17

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The reason Google lets you mark these as fixed is simply so they have an additional signal to help them know when to "try again" and revalidate. If you repeatedly mark them as fixed when they're not, the worst thing that will happen is you extend the time before Google revalidates and removes the issues.

You aren't going to get a penalty for "lying" about them being fixed or anything like that, nor will it have any impact on your traffic (except perhaps delaying any recrawling/revalidation) - Google is smarter than that, and trusts webmasters less than that ;)

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Each time beyond the first failed submission, we observed a subsequent drop in indexed pages in GSC. This was one per category. Soft 404s and 500s both had a warning prior to the drop. An incremental drop was observed every second failure and beyond. Fixing other problems between drops resulted in lesser drops upon failed submissions.

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    I don't see any reason to submit URLs as fixed in GSC when they aren't, so I'm not sure anybody else is going to want to take a risk and do any further experiments. I guess it is just good policy not to mark things as fixed falsely, even if your anecdotal evidence could just be coincidence.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Mar 16, 2022 at 17:09

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