Manual action is a penalty from Google applied to a site when it violates the search engine’s spam or guidelines.
What Is a Manual Action (Penalty)?
A manual action, commonly referred to as a Google penalty, is an intentional demotion or exclusion of a website from search results. It’s issued by a human reviewer at Google—not an algorithm—when your site is found to violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Manual actions can target your entire website or specific pages, sections, or link practices.
You’ll receive a notification in Google Search Console under the Manual Actions report when this happens.
Common Reasons for Manual Actions:
- Unnatural backlinks (to or from your site)
- Cloaking or sneaky redirects
- Thin, scraped, or spammy content
- Keyword stuffing
- User-generated spam
- Structured data manipulation
- Pure spam (e.g., autogenerated or malicious content)
How to Recover from a Manual Action:
- Identify the issue
Review the message in Google Search Console and understand the reason for the penalty. - Fix the problem
Remove spammy content, disavow or remove toxic backlinks, correct schema issues, etc. - Submit a reconsideration request
Explain clearly what you did to fix the violations and how you’ll avoid them in the future. - Wait for review
Google will notify you if the penalty is lifted or still in place.
Effects of a Manual Action:
- Sudden ranking drops or deindexing
- Loss of organic traffic
- Lower trustworthiness with users and search engines
- Potential long-term recovery timeline (especially for link-related penalties)
