Manual Action
A penalty issued by a human reviewer at Google after inspecting the site and finding a clear violation of the spam policies, delivered as a notice in Search Console.
Analogy Mental model
Being pulled over, handed a written notice, and having the car towed. Not a warning, a formal finding.
In practice What you actually do
Open the manual actions report and read the specific charge: unnatural links, pure spam, structured data manipulation, thin content, or similar, along with the scope. That wording determines the entire remediation plan, so work from the notice rather than from a guess.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
A manual action can remove pages or an entire site from results, including branded searches. The compensating advantage is that a human reads your appeal, and a properly documented fix can be lifted.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →