Manual action
A manual action is a penalty a person at Google applies when a site breaks its spam policies, lowering or removing pages from search.
A manual action is a penalty a person at Google places on a site that breaks its spam policies. Google's automated systems catch most spam on their own. A manual action is when a human reviewer has looked at the site and decided it breaks the rules. Some or all of its pages can then rank lower, or disappear from Google's results.
If you get one, Google tells you. It appears in the Manual actions report in Search Console, and Google usually sends an email too.
What gets you one
The causes are listed in Google's spam policies. Some of the most common:
- Unnatural links to your site, such as bought links or link schemes
- Unnatural links from your site to others, such as selling links
- Thin pages with little value, such as copied or mass-produced content
- Spam left by users, in comments, forums or profiles
- Hidden text, cloaking or misleading redirects
- Structured data that doesn't match what's on the page
A manual action can cover the whole site or only part of it, such as one section or a set of pages.
How to recover
- Read the report. It says what the problem is and which pages it affects.
- Fix it on every page affected, not only the examples Google gives.
- Ask for a review in the report, saying what you fixed and how.
For example, say Kestrel Roasters gets a manual action for unnatural links, left over from an agency that bought them years ago. Kestrel asks the sites to remove what it can, disavows the rest, and files a review request explaining both. Google reviews it, and if it's satisfied, lifts the action.
Manual actions and AI search
Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on Google Search, and a page has to be in its index to be shown as a source, as Google says in its guide to AI features. So a manual action that pushes your pages out of search can take them out of those answers too. Other AI platforms have their own rules, but many search the web before answering, and pages that drop out of search results are less likely to be found.