In this guide, we explain what a manual action is, why search engines issue these penalties, and how they can impact your website’s SEO. You’ll also learn how to check for manual actions, fix the issues, and recover your rankings.
What Is a Manual Action?
A manual action is a penalty given by a search engine to your website. It’s a clear signal that a real person at a search engine has reviewed your site and found that it is trying to manipulate the search results in a way that goes against the rules.
Manual actions are bad news for SEO because they can cause your site to be banned from a search engine’s index or to drop significantly in rankings. A search engine issues these penalties to fight spammers and other bad actors and to keep the quality of the search results high.
How to Know if You Have a Manual Action
The good news is that you don’t have to guess. If you have a manual action, a search engine will tell you directly in your search console account. Look for the Security & Manual Actions report. If you see a “No issues detected” message, you are in the clear.
If you have a manual action, the report will show you:
- What kind of issue was found.
- Which pages are affected.
- A button to request a review after you have fixed the issue.
Manual Actions vs. Algorithm Updates
It’s important to know the difference. A manual action is a penalty given to your site only, while a Google update affects many sites across the web. A manual action is, in a way, better because a search engine tells you exactly what the issue is and how to fix it. A Google update can be harder to recover from and involves a lot of guesswork.
How to Recover from a Manual Action
The good news about a manual action is that a search engine tells you what the issue is. The bad news is that you have to fix it. The exact fix depends on the type of manual action you received.
Spam
If a search engine finds a lot of spammy content on your site, you will get a penalty. The spam can be user-generated, or it can be content that was scraped from other sites. To recover, you should remove the spammy content. If the content was created by users, you may want to add extra measures to prevent this spam from coming back in the future.
Structured Data Issue
This happens if your structured data is misleading or does not match the content on your site. For example, if you show a 3-star review on your site but your structured data says it’s a 5-star review, you will get a penalty. To recover, you should make sure that your structured data is accurate and reflects the actual content on your site.
Unnatural Links
If you have participated in a link scheme or bought a lot of backlinks, you are likely to get a penalty. This can also happen if a competitor buys spammy links on your behalf. To recover, you should disavow the toxic links. This is a process of telling a search engine to ignore them. After you have disavowed them, you should file a review request.
Thin Content
This happens if a search engine finds a lot of pages that contain very little useful content. The content can be automatically generated or just low-quality. To recover, you should either remove the content or improve its quality so that it becomes useful to your visitors.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a tactic where you show your users one thing and a search engine something else. For example, you might have a special logic that redirects a user to a different page than the one a search engine sees. To recover, you should remove any logic that creates a different experience for a user and a search engine.
Hidden Text and/or Keyword Stuffing
This happens when you use a certain keyword excessively on a page, in a way that it becomes unnatural to read. This can also happen if you have a lot of keyword-optimized text that is not visible to the user. To recover, you should write a text for human beings and remove any text that is invisible from your code.
Conclusion
A manual action is a very serious penalty that can have a negative impact on your visibility in search. The key is to check your search console regularly, so you can find out about a manual action as soon as it happens. After you have fixed the issue on all the affected pages, you can file a reconsideration request. If all went well, your site should be back in a search engine’s index shortly.
