Google Penalty
SEO Issues

Manual actions are still around, however the types of them tend to vary over time. A manual action is where someone at Google has reviewed your website and found some aspect of it that appears to have broken Google’s webmaster guidelines or where it has participated in spammy techniques in order to “game Google” to rank higher.

A manual action has required human intervention - this usually happens if Google’s algorithms have flagged a site for suspicious activity that then warrants a human review. The type of manual action will depend on what has been done - this will also dictate whether the manual action is against a single URL, a group of URLS or the full domain/website.

Manual actions are often “sudden” where the impact is instantaneous as soon as the message appears within your Google Search Console profile - recovery is usually contingent on a “reconsideration request” being successful, in short, you fix the offending issue that was flagged by a human and you tell Google you’ve fixed it, this is called a reconsideration request.

There are a broad number of manual actions, including but not limited to:

• Unnatural links to your site, and separately unnatural links from your site, which are the classic link scheme actions and the reason the disavow tool still exists
• Thin content with little or no added value, which Google explicitly frames as covering thin affiliate pages, scraped or low quality guest content, and doorway pages
• Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects, plus the separate cloaked images action and the sneaky mobile redirects action which usually turns up on hacked sites or dodgy ad scripts rather than deliberate manipulation
• Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing ( a classic in the blackhat SEO playbook)
• User generated spam, and the broader "site abused with third party spam" action which covers forums, guestbooks, file uploaders, internal search pages and so on
• Site reputation abuse, i.e. the parasite SEO action, where Google notes that moving the offending content to a subdomain or subdirectory may be treated as an attempt to circumvent the policy and could trigger broader action against the site
• Major spam problems, which is the general catch all for aggressive stuff & now explicitly references scaled content abuse alongside cloaking and repeat or egregious violations
• Back button hijacking which is a newer manual action covering sites that manipulate browser history so users can't get back to the SERP
• Structured data issues, which only strips your rich results rather than your rankings, and covers everything from marking up invisible content to JobPosting and ClaimReview misuse - aggregateRating was common for abuse
• Spammy free host, where a hosting service gets actioned wholesale because enough of what it hosts is spam - although this is incredibly rare now
• AMP content mismatch, still documented although obviously far less relevant now
• News and Discover policy violation which is its own big family covering dangerous content, deceptive practices (coordinated behaviour, good neighbour, impersonation, misrepresentation of affiliation or location), harassment, hate, manipulated media, medical content, misleading content, sexually explicit content, terrorist content, transparency and violence or gore

Manual actions are generally EASIER to fix than actions that relate to algorithmic suppression, this is because a manual action TELLS you what the issue is, whereas algorithmic suppression leaves an impact but no reason as to why - which is where a professional SEO audit usually comes in to try and identify the potential reasons and a roadmap to recovery.

A manual action CAN be a bit more complex when it comes to things like link spam because you often need to go through a phase of link auditing, building disavows in batches and then submitting them - but, the manual actions do not tell you which links are spammy, so quite often getting a reconsideration request through can be more difficult and time consuming.

In general, most manual actions that are URL or URL group specific can usually be fixed quite quickly, sometimes within as little as 2-4 weeks, however larger manual actions i.e. site wide manual actions can take longer depending on the size of the website and the type of manual action you have.

We help clients to get manual actions removed and for restorative ranking / traffic action to commence.