You may have logged on to your Google Search Console recently and noticed something called a Manual Action. You probably dismissed it as you didn’t understand what it was or if it was important or not. If this is the case, please read the below guide!
Even if this is not the case, understanding Google Manual Actions is incredibly important because they can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings and online visibility. In the below guide, I explain what these actions are, their different types, and how you can remove them.
Understanding the Manual Action – What is it?
Google has a strict range of policies and quality guidelines. These are implemented to make sure that the websites they are promoting on their search engine results and Google Display Network are high-quality and offer real value to the end user.
This is where Manual Actions come into play. Think of a Manual Action as a penalty that Google applies to your site. Specifically, Google Manual Actions are issued when a human reviewer assesses your website and finds an issue that breaks one of their policies or guidelines.
What is the Negative Impact of a Google Manual Action?
If you are hit with one or more Manual Actions, your Google search engine rankings will be affected. How badly they are affected depends on the severity of your policy breach.
For example, a minor abuse could result in your page appearing lower than it should in Google SERPs. However, severe and repeat abuses can result in your website being completed omitted from SERPS, i.e. your website simply won’t appear.
This, of course, can be incredibly damaging to your reputation, online visibility, local SEO, and digital marketing strategies. The result of this can then affect your website traffic, sales, and revenue. Simply put, you don’t want to gain any Google Manual Actions and if you do, the problem must be rectified quickly to avoid too much negative fallout.
Current Google Manual Actions
You can find a complete list of manual actions and a guide to removing them, but to make things easier, I’ve created a complete summary table below that explains each issue.
| Manual Action | Description |
| Site abused with third-party spam | A major part of your website has spammy content that violates Google’s spam policies. This could be content generated by you, visitors, or third parties. |
| User-generated spam | Your website contains spam from visiting users. This spam is usually found in comments, forums, guestbook pages, and user profiles. |
| Spammy free host | A major portion of websites hosted on the same free hosting platform you use are deemed to be spammy. This is more difficult to sort as you don’t have direct control over the other websites. |
| Structured data issue | Some markup on your website is incompliant with Google’s structured data guidelines. This could be something like making content hidden. |
| Unnatural links to your site | Links to your website have been detected to be unnatural i.e. you have paid for backlinks or have participated in a link building scheme to try and game Google search rankings. |
| Unnatural links from your site | Essentially the same as the above but for links on your website pointing to other external websites. |
| Thin content with little or no added value | Content on your website has been detected that Google deems offers no added value to the viewer. This could be low-quality blogs, scraped content, or doorway content. Your content must give some value to the reader! |
| Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects | Google has detected that you are showing different pages/content to your users than to Google. For example, you could be using redirects to send users to a different page than the one Google saw. |
| Major spam problems | Your site is effectively full of spam and aggressively violating Google’s spam policies. For example, you may have generated hundreds of low-quality content using AI tools. |
| Cloaked images | Some of your website images are displaying different in Google Searches than on your website. Cloaking is a major policy breach because users are not getting the images they expected from Google searches. |
| Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing | Your pages use keyword stuffing practices and/or are hiding text from the users with the sole purpose of manipulating search engine results. |
| AMP content mismatch | A difference between an AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) version and the original canonical version has been detected. |
| Sneaky mobile redirects | Your website has pages that redirect mobile users to different content that isn’t available to Google’s search engine crawlers. |
| News and Discover policy violations | Your website contains content that violates the Google News and/or Discover policies. Examples of potential violating content include adult-themed, dangerous, manipulated media, terrorist content, violence and gore, and sexually explicit content. |
| Site reputation abuse | Google has detected that you are essentially allowing third-party content on your website without vetting it or having any input. For example, you may have allowed a poor-quality guest post on your website purely for SEO purposes. |
As you can see, most of these things are intentional and you will most likely know if you’ve done them. However, there are some that can be a genuine accident such as user-generated spam, structured data issues, third-party spam, and unnatural links.
The good news is, is that as you will see below, you can remove manual actions. We also have a range of free webinars with useful advice relating to Google products that could be of further help for prevent manual actions from happening.
How to Remove a Manual Action from Google
It is possible to remove a Manual Action from Google – you essentially have to fix the issue and request a review. To do that, do the following:
- Login to your Google Search Console account.
- Find the manual action section in your console report (It should be highlighted at the top).
- Use the drop-down arrows on the right-hand side of each manual action to read the description and see what the issue is (there should be a “learn more” link to see detailed info).
- Fix the issues for ALL affected pages for each manual action (If you only fix half the pages concerned with one manual action, the action will NOT be removed).
- Once you are certain ALL the manual action issues have been fixed, click on the “Request Review” option in your Google Search Console report.
- In the request review section, make sure that you explain in detail what you have done to fix the manual action issues. This should include an understanding of the initial issue, the steps you took to fix it, and the end result of the fix.
The review request can take weeks to process depending on the complexity and number of issues. You should receive regular progress updates by email and will receive an email to say when the review is complete with the results. If you were successful – fantastic! If some actions still remain, you will essentially need to repeat the process again and submit a new review request.
Tips for Avoiding Manual Actions from Google
As you can see, many of the Manual Actions result from poor SEO practices or poor-quality content. We have a fantastic free SEO guide that offers many useful pointers to help with this, but I’ve created some actionable tips below too:
Control and Monitor Third-Party Input
If you have things like user profiles, forums, and comments, they must have strict permissions and their content moderated! For example, you can often set comment widgets so that you have to approve the comment before it goes live on your website. Moderation of third-party content does take time and effort, but it’s essential if you want to avoid Manual Actions from Google.
Only Create High-Quality, Useful Content, Using the Principles of E-E-A-T
Don’t create content for contents sake as this can be marked as spam and generate a Manual Action. Any content you create such as blogs, product pages, and reviews must be well-written, high-quality, and give real value to the customer. Always use the principle of Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) to comply with their Helpful Content guidelines.
Earn Backlinks Naturally
You must pay attention to your backlink strategy. Never pay for backlinks or join backlink farming schemes. You should win backlinks naturally. Also, make sure you have input and control over how the backlink is used. For example, you should be the one writing the guest post to make sure that the link is used in a relevant context and with the right anchor words.
Manage your Link Strategies Carefully
Internal links, external links, and backlinks must be given careful consideration. Don’t just stick links into your content without think why, how, where, and who. For external links, check the validity and relevance of the content, and the authority of the third-party site For internal links, make sure the link is relevant in the context of the article.
Perform a Technical SEO Audit
Lastly, to prevent any potential Manual Actions such as structured data issues or hidden data, I advise a technical SEO audit. A technical audit will assess your website and look for errors with things like code, your robots.txt file, loading speeds, and markup. Making sure your website is technically sound can help reduce the chance of Manual Actions.
To Protect Your SEO Investment, Work to Remove Google Manual Actions as Quickly as Possible
Hopefully, you should never have to deal with Google Manual Actions. However, in the event that you do, the above advice and walkthrough will be invaluable. If you encounter manual actions, it’s important that you take time to understand why the issue happened to prevent it from being a recurrence.
Also, it’s essential that you address the problem, fix it, and submit a review request ASAP to avoid too much damage to your search engine rankings and online visibility. If you unsure how to fix the action, or why it occurred initially, contact us and we can point you in the right direction.
