What Is a Manual Action? How Google Penalties Work and How to Recover

A manual action is a penalty applied by a person at Google. Google’s Manual Actions report documentation explains that “Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google’s spam policies.” Affected pages can rank lower or disappear from results. Unlike an algorithmic drop, a manual action is announced in Search Console, names the violation, and is lifted through a reconsideration request after the problem is fixed on every affected page.

Manual Actions and Algorithmic Drops

	Manual action	Algorithmic change
Who decides	A human reviewer	Google's ranking systems
Notice	The Manual Actions report and the Search Console message center	None
Tied to	A named spam policy violation	No single cause
How it ends	A reconsideration request after the fix	Systems reassess the site over time

If the Manual Actions report shows nothing, a ranking drop is not a manual action, however sudden it looks. Google notes that its “algorithms are extremely good at detecting spam, and in most cases we automatically discover it and remove it from our search results”; manual actions are the reviewed exceptions.

Types of Manual Action

The report documentation lists the actions Google can apply, among them:

Unnatural links to your site, and unnatural links from your site
Thin content with little or no added value
Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects, and sneaky mobile redirects
Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
User-generated spam, spammy free hosts, and sites abused with third-party spam
Structured data issues
Major spam problems, such as scaled content abuse and cloaking
AMP content mismatch
News and Discover policy violations
Back button hijacking, where a site manipulates browser history so visitors cannot return to the page they came from
Site reputation policy violations, an action whose impact, the documentation notes, does not apply to search results shown to users in the European Economic Area

Hacked content is handled separately, through the Security Issues report. Site reputation abuse, where third-party content is published on a host site to borrow its ranking signals, has its own manual action; Google tightened the policy in November 2024, stating that “no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content.”

Reading the Report

Each action has a description and, where Google provides them, example URLs. The scope varies: “This can be a subset of your site, or the entire site.” An action labeled “Affects all pages” applies to the whole site. Google’s instruction for either case is the same: “Fixing the issue on just some pages will not earn you a partial return to search results.” Make sure Google can reach the fixed pages; they “should not require a login, be behind a paywall, or be blocked by robots.txt or a noindex directive.”

Fixing Unnatural Links

For the unnatural links action, Google’s steps are specific:

Download your links from Search Console, by linking site or by date.
Check them against the link spam policy, starting with the sites that link most and links created in recent months.
Ask the owners of violating sites to remove the links or qualify them with rel="nofollow" or a more specific attribute.
Disavow the links you could not get removed.

Google warns: “If you can get a backlink removed, make a good-faith effort to remove the link first. Blindly adding all backlinks to the disavow file is not considered a good-faith effort, and will not be enough to make your reconsideration request successful.”

The Reconsideration Request

When every listed issue is fixed on every page, select Request Review in the report. Google’s guidance: “A good request does three things”:

“Explains the exact quality issue on your site.”
“Describes the steps you’ve taken to fix the issue.”
“Documents the outcome of your efforts.”

If you bought a site that violated the policies before you owned it, Google asks you to fix the issues and say in the request that you recently acquired the site. A request that denies the problem or skips the details of what changed gives the reviewer nothing to approve.

How Long Review Takes

Google sets expectations without a fixed time: “Most reconsideration reviews can take several days or weeks, although in some cases, such as link-related reconsideration requests, it may take longer than usual to review your request.” You receive a confirmation when the request is sent and are informed of progress by email. Google asks you not to “resubmit your request before you get a final decision on your outstanding request.”

After the Action Is Lifted

Lifting the action removes the penalty; it does not restore earlier positions by itself. The pages return to normal ranking, and links that were removed or disavowed no longer count for the site, so rankings settle at the level the remaining signals support.

Preventing Manual Actions

Qualify paid and sponsored links with rel="sponsored" (or nofollow) and user-submitted links with ugc.
Moderate comments, forums, and other user content, and block obvious spam terms at submission.
Keep structured data matched to what is visible on the page.
Audit third-party scripts for behavior such as back button interference.
Check the Security Issues report, so that a hack is fixed before it spreads spam across the site.

A suspension of a Google Business Profile is a different process, handled through the business profile’s own reinstatement path, not through Search Console.