What Is A Manual Action?

Date First Published: 7th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what a manual action is in this article.

A manual action is a temporary penalty issued by Google for violating their webmaster guidelines. These happen when a member of Google's team has determined that a page or a website is against their guidelines. The penalty consists of lowering the search rankings of or deindexing the page or website. The manual action can affect a single page, pages matching a pattern, or even the whole website.

Although Google's algorithms are good at detecting spam and automatically removing it from their search results without a manual review, Google is also willing to take manual action to remove spam from its index. When a member of Google's team issues a manual action, the website owner will be notified by email and it will show up on their Google Search Console report, which they can see by logging into their Google account.

What Causes A Website To Get A Manual Action?

Websites get a manual action due to their pages violating Google Webmaster Guidelines. The things that can violate Google Webmaster Guidelines and lead to a manual action are:

• User-generated spam - This is when Google detects spam on a website generated by users. This type of spam is often found on forum pages, user profiles, or comment pages.
• Unnatural outbound links - This is when Google detects a pattern of unnatural or artificial outbound links pointing outward from a website.
• Unnatural inbound links - This is when Google detects a pattern of unnatural or artificial inbound links pointing to a website.
• Cloaking/sneaky redirects - This is when different content is shown to Google than to users or users are being redirected to a different page that Google saw.
• Cloaked images - Some images on the website display differently in Google's search results than on the website. Cloaking images can provide a bad user experience for Google image search results, as obscured images and mismatched thumbnails do not provide the user with the image that they are searching for.
• Spammy free host - This is when a large number of sites hosted on a free web hosting service are considered to be spammy by Google. If a large number of sites hosted on a free web hosting service are spammy, Google may take manual action on the whole service.
• Hidden text/keyword stuffing - These techniques involve placing an unnecessarily large amount of keywords onto a page to manipulate the ranking of the page and make sentences sound odd or showing text that is invisible to users, but visible to search engine bots (e.g. the text is the same colour as the background).
• Thin content - Thin content includes low-quality content that has little value for users. Examples of thin content are doorway pages, thin affiliate pages, content scraped from other sources, and auto-generated content.
• Structured data issue - This is when Google detects that the markup of a site is using techniques that fall outside of their guidelines (e.g. marking up content that is invisible to users or marking up irrelevant or misleading content).
• Pure spam - The site is using aggressive spam techniques that violate Google's guidelines.
• AMP content mismatch - There is a difference in the content between the AMP version and its canonical webpage.
• Sneaky mobile redirects - Some pages on a website redirect mobile device users to content unavailable to search engine bots.
• News and discover policies - The website has violated policies for Google News and/or Discover.

How To Fix Manual Actions?

Website owners can fix manual actions by taking a look at why they got the manual action and the description and then selecting 'Request Review' in the report. In the reconsideration request, the site owner will describe the steps they have taken to fix the issue, the outcomes of their efforts, and the exact quality issue on their websites. Then, their reconsideration request will be reviewed. Reviews can take several days or weeks, depending on the type of manual action. The website owner will be notified by email when Google receives their request and when they have reviewed it.

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