What is a Manual Action?
Manual action, or Google penalty, is the punishment that Google imposes on sites that go against its guidelines. It is only issued after a human reviewer has reviewed the site.
Google has a set of guidelines that it expects sites to follow. However, some sites knowingly or unknowingly engage in activities that go against these guidelines.
When Google suspects it gets a human reviewer to review the site. If the reviewer determines the site engaged in activities that go against Google’s guidelines, then Google proceeds to strike the site with a manual action.
Sites affected by manual action usually see their rankings reduced and may even be removed entirely from search results.
You can lift the manual action by rectifying the violation and submitting a reconsideration request to Google.
How to Find if You Have Been Issued a Manual Action?
If you suspect you’ve been issued a manual action, verify it by logging into your Google Search Console and navigating to Security & Manual Actions.
Click Manual Actions here, as shown below.
Any manual action on your site will be displayed here. If there is no manual action, it will show a ‘No issues detected’ message, as shown below.
