Manual Action
What is Manual Action? – Definition
Manual action is a penalty imposed by Google for not following the webmaster guidelines. What are the consequences of this? Most often, it results in decreased visibility of a given website in search results. There are 2 types of manual actions: site-wide and partial. As a result of site-wide manual actions (the entire website is affected by Google penalties), all keywords get low positions. The issue looks different in the case of partial actions where Google penalizes only some pages – then the visibility of certain keywords suddenly drops.
How to Detect Google Manual Actions? All the necessary information can be found in the Google Search Console tool.
To detect Google manual actions, you need to:
- sign in to Google Search Console,
- go to your property,
- check the Security & Manual Actions section,
- open the Manual actions report.
Manual actions can be applied by Google for several reasons:
- pure spam or user-generated spam,
- unnatural links from the site and to the site,
- hidden text,
- keyword stuffing,
- thin content.
How to Fix Manual Actions?
To fix manual actions, you need to find out why your website was penalized in the first place and follow the instructions provided by Google explaining how to fix a particular manual action.
