Manual Actions: when the risk shifts to your site

You receive a notification in Search Console. Traffic plummets within a few hours. The pages that were driving traffic to your site disappear from the SERPs. For years, you’ve interpreted “manual action” as a penalty for those who cheated—bought links, cloaking, hidden text—convinced that your site, run by the book and with common sense, was immune. Today, that interpretation no longer holds up. The violations covered by the Manual Actions report have multiplied, and the scope of risk has shifted. You’re not penalized (just) because you’ve cheated, but because a JavaScript library from your ad network manipulates the browser history, because the comments section you haven’t moderated in six months is full of pharmaceutical spam, because a partner is publishing content under your domain that would never rank on its own. Manual action is no longer a punishment for dishonesty: it’s a diagnosis of a digital perimeter that you don’t control closely enough. You need a different way of interpreting it. Not as a condemnation—Google removed the word “penalty” from its vocabulary for this very reason—but as a notification that tells you where your system has deviated from Search’s guidelines. Only then can you protect the identity of your brand and ensure it remains a reliable point of reference for both users and machines.

What Are Google’s Manual Actions?

Manual actions are interventions that Google’s Search Quality team applies when a human reviewer determines that certain pages on your site do not comply with the Google Search Essentials. The effect is tangible: the affected pages are demoted in search results or removed from the index, and you’ll receive a notification in two places within your Search Console account—the Manual Actions report and the Messages Center. The vocabulary you use to think about this tool matters. The term “penalty” continues to circulate because it’s quick, intuitive, and convenient, but Google hasn’t used the term “penalty” for years and has chosen “manual action” precisely to distance itself from the idea of punishment. It’s not a verdict; it’s a diagnostic report: it tells you where your system doesn’t comply with the rules, shows you the scope of the problem, and outlines the steps to resolve it. It doesn’t occur as an isolated incident and almost always signals a control issue. Sometimes it concerns old and all-too-familiar practices; in other cases, it brings to light much more current vulnerabilities: sections open to users, third-party content, poorly monetized areas, improperly used markup, and technical issues that alter the browsing experience. If you treat the manual action as a moral stigma, you’re approaching it from the wrong angle. If you treat it as a technical misalignment to be corrected, you’re already halfway there.

Google’s Official Definition

The official documentation is clear and practical: Google issues a manual action when a human reviewer has determined that certain pages on your site do not comply with its spam policies. In most cases, the problem involves attempts to manipulate the index, and the outcome is clear in its two forms—demotion or removal—both of which occur without any visible warning to users searching on Google.

Navigating the site cannot remain intuitive

Bring order to your data, links, and structural issues with SEOZoom’s tools designed for operational monitoring.

Activate your SEOZoom free trial

This detail changes everything. The user searching sees nothing out of the ordinary; they continue to see a clean SERP and have no idea that your site has disappeared. You only find out by opening Search Console. It’s one of the reasons why many sites don’t notice the manual action until weeks later, attributing the traffic drop to the wrong causes. The notification is there, but you have to look for it where it is: in the dedicated report and in the Messages Center. And when it’s there, you’re not left to speculate: you’re given a specific type of violation, a specific area to examine, and a procedure that requires full correction and a request for review. The definition, therefore, serves less to “know what it is” and much more to understand what territory you’re entering to address. There’s only one operational rule to remember: without a notification in Search Console, there’s no manual action. If you’re looking for a penalty and don’t find it in the report, your problem lies elsewhere—a core update, a technical issue, a shift in query intent—and requires a different diagnosis. Starting off on the wrong track will cost you weeks.

What Can Happen to an Affected Site

The impact of a manual action isn’t uniform; it depends on how extensive the scope of the problem is that the reviewer has identified. The report itself outlines the two main types, and you should base your response on these. The first is a partial action. In the report, you’ll see a pattern of URLs—something like https://tuosito.it/sezione-problematica/*—and Google is telling you that the problem is localized there. Not all pages under that pattern are necessarily affected, but that entire area must be cleaned up. The impact is limited but can be very damaging if the affected section is the one driving traffic to your site: if the entire commercial section of your e-commerce site ends up under a manual action, the fact that it’s “partial” matters little. The second is a site-wide action, which appears in the report with the label “Affects all pages” . Here, the demotion or removal affects the entire domain, and organic traffic can disappear within hours. It’s not enough to address just one part: you need a complete cleanup and a reconsideration request that’s much more thoroughly documented than the first one. In both scenarios, the damage isn’t just the drop in visibility in SERPs. There is reputational damage occurring in parallel—a site that suddenly disappears is perceived as less reliable even by users who were already familiar with it—and in some cases, there is collateral damage that few consider. Since Google linked Search actions to eligibility for Google Ads, certain manual actions can also shut off the flow of paid advertising. It’s not a universal rule, but it’s an additional factor that compounds the organic problem. Those with a business model that combines organic traffic and Google Ads campaigns risk losing both at the same time.

Why They Still Exist and Why the Issue Is Broader Today

Looking at it this way, you might think that manual actions are a relic of an era when SEO was a Wild West and algorithms couldn’t reach everywhere. It’s a convenient but mistaken interpretation. Google continues to use them because certain behaviors remain beyond the reach of automated systems, and others require a contextual assessment that only a human eye can provide. The classic black-hat tactics—white text on a white background, networks of spam sites linking to one another—are just the first layer of the scope covered by manual actions, and it’s the least interesting one today. The real scope has shifted. Today, the report covers scenarios that didn’t exist ten years ago: site reputation abuse, in which a domain with a history allows third-party content to be published that exploits its authority to rank; back-button hijacking, which manipulates the browser history to trap users trying to go back; cloaked images, a variant of cloaking applied specifically to images; scaled content abuse, that is, the industrial-scale production of synthetic content to intercept massive volumes of queries. These are violations that reveal a web very different from the past—a web where monetization is complex, third parties are everywhere, and JavaScript libraries do things you have no control over—and that require us to view risk in a completely different way. The real point is that deliberate black-hat violations are only a small part of the problem. The bulk of the issue today stems from weak governance: widgets you don’t understand, partners you don’t oversee, opaque monetization, and third-party content you bring under your domain without having assessed the implications. Manual actions no longer punish only those who cheat, but also those who have stopped monitoring their own perimeter.

What Are Google’s Manual Actions

The Manual Actions report reflects Google’s priorities in combating index manipulation and now covers a broad list of cases, which are listed alphabetically in the official documentation. To truly understand them, it’s better to group them by the nature of the problem, because the countermeasures vary depending on which part of your system is causing the violation. Four categories cover the bulk of violations: manipulation of authority signals and spam (those who manipulate links, third-party content, or domain reputation); content quality (those who produce thin, scraped, or manipulative content); technical inconsistencies and cloaking (those who show Google different content than what the user sees); and behavioral abuses (those who manipulate the user’s browser). In addition to these, there is a separate category for the specific policies of Google News and Discover, which have a different editorial nature. Within each category, the risk logic is different, and therefore the approach to managing it is also different.

• Manipulation of authority signals and spam

This category includes violations that attempt to alter Google’s perception of your site’s authority. The mechanism is always the same: artificially building positive signals—links, content, inherited reputation—to rank higher than your actual merits would allow. This has historically been at the heart of black-hat SEO, but it also includes very recent cases involving business models that were considered normal until recently.

1. Unnatural links to your site

What it is: Google has identified a pattern of artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to your site. This is typically the result of link schemes involving purchased links, massive link exchanges, or networks of satellite sites built to pass on ranking. The fact that you didn’t always commission the links—sometimes they come as a “negative SEO attack” from a competitor—doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility to monitor your backlink profile. Effects: demotion or removal of part or all of the site, depending on the extent of the detected pattern. Correction: download the list of inbound links from Search Console, identify those that violate the policy, and contact the owners of the linking sites to request their removal. For those you cannot get removed, use the Disavow tool. Be careful, though: blanket disavowal—done without first attempting removal—is a negative signal during the reconsideration process. The reviewer wants to see a good-faith effort—emails sent, responses received—and the Disavow tool used as a last resort, not as the first choice.

2. Unnatural links from your site — unnatural outbound links from your site

What it is: The pattern is the same as for inbound links, but in reverse: you’re artificially passing PageRank to external sites through paid links, undisclosed guest posts, or systematic link exchanges. The most common scenario involves sites that sell links in sponsored articles without properly marking them. Effects: Demotion of the affected pages or the entire domain. Correction: Identify outgoing links that are paid or appear to violate the policy; remove them or add the rel=“nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attributes, which indicate the nature of the link and keep you from violating the policy without needing to delete the link.

3. Site abused with third-party spam — site used for third-party spam

What it is: Certain sections of your site are being used by visitors or third parties to host spam content. Forums, guestbooks, internal search pages, upload platforms, and free hosting services are classic targets. You do not produce the content yourself; you allow it to be produced and do not moderate it. Google considers this your problem. Effects: The action affects only pages with spam content. Paradoxically, this is a silver lining: it means Google still considers your site’s overall quality high enough not to extend the penalty to the entire domain. But if the problem escalates, the overall rating may worsen. Correction: Identify the pages where users can submit content; use the `site:` operator followed by off-topic commercial terms (“viagra,” “watch movie free online,” casinos, medications) to see what Google has indexed. Remove the content, implement moderation, evaluate the rel=”ugc” attribute on user-generated links, and consolidate interactive areas into dedicated file paths to facilitate future monitoring.

4. User-generated spam — spam generated by users

What it is: This is a more focused variant of the previous point and specifically concerns spam detected in areas designed for user contributions—blog comments, forum posts, user profiles, and signatures. The distinguishing feature is that Google recognizes the authors of spam content as users (or, more often, as bots posing as users), rather than as third parties exploiting the site. Effects: removal of the affected pages from the index, with a proportional impact on visibility. Remedy: active cleanup, systematic moderation, anti-spam tools. Here, success depends on the process rather than a one-time fix: a site with a UGC strategy but no structured moderation process will sooner or later fall victim to this violation.

5. Spammy free host — a free hosting service containing spam

What it is: If you manage a free hosting service and a significant portion of the sites you host are full of spam, Google may take action against the entire service. This is a specific scenario for providers, but it has important implications for “innocent” sites hosted on the same service: they may suffer collateral damage regardless of their own quality. Effects: Manual action extended to the hosting service, harming all hosted domains. Remedy: If you manage the service, remove spam accounts and implement active monitoring. If you’re a hosted site that has been negatively affected, the quickest solution is often to migrate to a different hosting provider, followed by a reconsideration request once the migration is complete.

6. Site reputation abuse — abuse of site reputation

What it is: This is one of the most recent and most debated cases, as it affects business models that were considered normal until recently in publishing and affiliate marketing. The mechanism is straightforward: a third party publishes content under your domain, and what they’re using isn’t the physical space on your platform—it’s the ranking weight that your domain has accumulated over the years. Content that would never rank on a new domain, when hosted under an authoritative brand, inherits trust signals it hasn’t earned. White-label agreements, undisclosed editorial partnerships, hosting affiliate directories in subfolders, and publishing licenses granted to third parties: these are all mechanisms that potentially fall under this violation. Effects: The action targets the pages in violation. If the site continues to operate in violation, broader actions that impact the overall ranking may follow. Correction: Google outlines four approaches. Move the content to a new domain without redirects from the old one (use nofollow for any links); apply `noindex` to the violating content to exclude it from the index; convert the content into genuine first-party content, no longer third-party; or remove it entirely. One thing that doesn’t work: moving content to a subdomain or subfolder of the same site. Google explicitly considers this an attempt to circumvent the policy and may result in broader actions.

• Content Quality and Added Value

This category covers violations related to the substance of the content: pages that offer no real value to the user, content mass-produced to target search queries, and structured markup used to manipulate the appearance of SERPs. This is the area where qualitative assessments carry the most weight, and therefore the one where the line between “mediocre content” and “non-compliant content” requires the most attention.

7. Thin content with little or no added value — sparse content or content with no added value

What it is: pages that provide little or no value to readers. There are three typical examples. Affiliate pages without significant original content, which feature manufacturer descriptions and conversion links. Content taken from other sources without any processing: scraping, poorly written guest posts, and summaries of others’ articles sold as original content. Doorway pages built solely to intercept specific search queries and redirect users elsewhere. Effects: removal from the index, which may be partial or site-wide, depending on the extent of the violation. Correction: Identify content that replicates material found elsewhere, thin pages with affiliate links, and any doorway pages. Honestly assess whether your site offers real value, even by asking people outside the project to do so for you. Improve what can be improved; remove what cannot be salvaged. There is no formula for “quality content”; there is only the work involved in creating it.

8. Major spam problems — serious spam issues

What it is: This is the category that covers the most severe cases. Aggressive or repeated techniques: extreme cloaking, massive scraping, and above all scaled content abuse—the large-scale production of content generated automatically or with minimal original input, typically to cover very large volumes of queries at low cost. This is an issue that Google has formalized relatively recently and that is becoming increasingly significant as generative systems make it trivial to produce thousands of pages in a short time. Effects: The site is classified as spam and removed from the index very quickly. This is the most severe form. Remediation: There are no half-measures here. The entire site must be cleaned up, the content brought back into compliance, and the reconsideration request must be very detailed. Upon the first violation, there is room for recovery if the effort is thorough. After a relapse, that window closes: Google tends not to grant further chances, and the realistic course of action becomes shutting down and starting over with a new project.

9. Structured data issue — problems with structured data

What it is: The structured markup on your pages is using techniques that violate Google’s guidelines. Classic examples include marking up content that isn’t visible to users, applying Schema to irrelevant content (a company marked as “Product,” an event that’s actually a promotion, a JobPosting used by someone looking for a job rather than offering one), and reviews marked as independent when they’re written by the company itself. Effects: You lose access to rich results and advanced features in the SERPs. It’s not the loss of ranking that hurts the most, but if you were building your visibility on enriched snippets, their disappearance is significant. Correction: Update the markup to comply with the specific guidelines for the type of Schema you’re using, remove non-compliant markup, and submit a reconsideration request.

• Technical Inconsistencies and Cloaking

This category encompasses all situations where there is a discrepancy between what Google sees and what the user sees, or technical behaviors that direct users to pages other than those indexed. The common thread is deception: the search engine and its users expect consistency, and when this consistency is broken—whether intentionally or through negligence—Google intervenes. This is one of the categories historically most affected by manual actions, because classic cloaking destroys the trust mechanism upon which the entire SERP is based.

10. Cloaking and sneaky redirects — cloaking and deceptive redirects

What it is: You show Google different content than what users see, or redirect users to pages other than those indexed. It’s the oldest trick in the black-hat playbook, and it remains one of the most severely penalized because it completely undermines Google’s trust in the index: if what the search engine sees doesn’t match what the user receives, the system no longer works. Important side note: A paywall is not cloaking if managed correctly with dedicated structured data that signals to Google the nature of the protected content. Effects: Demotion or removal from the index, typically on a large scale. Fix: Use Search Console’s URL Inspection tool to compare what Google sees with what the user sees, identify the server-side code causing the discrepancy, and remove it. Also check for conditional redirects, which are often written in JavaScript or in the .htaccess file: these are the most insidious variant because they redirect only certain categories of visitors—those coming from Google, those with specific IP addresses—and are invisible to anyone testing the site under normal conditions.

11. Cloaked images

What it is: a variant of cloaking specific to images. You show Google one thing and the user another: replaced images, partially obscured images, images with overlapping text blocks, or thumbnails that don’t match the actual content. The result is a distorted Google Images experience, where the user clicks on one thing and finds another. Effects: the images involved lose visibility on Google Images, and in the most severe cases, the impact extends beyond the individual resource. Correction: Align the images shown to Google with those shown to users. If you legitimately want to exclude your images from search results, there is an opt-out procedure for inline linking that Google considers acceptable and that does not trigger a manual action.

12. Hidden text and keyword stuffing

What it is: text the same color as the background, text moved off-screen using CSS, paragraphs of meaningless repeated keywords, <title> tags, and alt attributes stuffed with variations of the same keyword. These are first-generation SEO practices, yet they continue to appear—often as remnants of optimizations made years ago and forgotten, or as ill-conceived additions from poorly configured SEO plugins. Effects: A drop in the rankings of the affected pages, up to and including removal from the index. Correction: Check the URL to verify what Google sees; perform a visual inspection by selecting all text on the page to detect text hidden by color; analyze the CSS to uncover text moved off-screen; remove paragraphs of repeated keywords; and rewrite and alt tags containing artificial strings.

13. AMP content mismatch — discrepancy between the AMP and canonical pages

What it is: The AMP version of a page has content that differs significantly from the canonical version. The text does not have to be identical, but the topic and the actions available to the user must match. Effects: AMP pages are excluded from Search; Google displays the canonical pages instead. Fix: Verify the association between the AMP and canonical versions; check content consistency; use URL Inspection for both versions. A technical detail that often causes unintended discrepancies: a robots.txt file that blocks resources on one of the two versions creates asymmetries that Google interprets as a mismatch, even when there is no intent to manipulate.

14. Sneaky mobile redirects — deceptive mobile redirects

What it is: Some pages redirect users arriving from smartphones to content different from what is indexed. This can be intentional—an improper monetization strategy—or unintentional, often the result of ad network scripts or third-party compromise of the site. The result for Google is the same: the same URL, but two different pieces of content depending on the device. Effects: removal of URLs from the index; significant impact if the issue affects many pages. Fix: First, check the Security Issues report—if the site has been compromised, the root cause is there. Remove third-party scripts one at a time to isolate the culprit, correct any intentional configurations, and test the pages’ behavior on a real smartphone and a Chrome emulator.

• Behavioral and Technical Abuses

This category is the most recent and the most interesting to understand, because it marks a paradigm shift in how Google views violations. The cases listed here do not manipulate the index in the traditional sense—they do not lie to Google, nor do they buy artificial authority—but they do manipulate the user’s browser behavior. They betray users’ expectations about how the web itself works, not about the accuracy of the content. This is the area where Google has begun to classify as spam what was previously considered merely a “poor user experience.”

15. Back-button hijacking — manipulation of the Back button

What it is: This is the most recent case formalized in the report, classified under the category of malicious practices. The technical mechanism is precise: when a page loads, a script abuses the browser’s History API—history.pushState, history.replaceState—by injecting false states into the history. Users who click the Back button expecting to return to the previous page instead end up on pages they’ve never visited, on commercial offers, on ads, or get trapped in loops that are difficult to escape. Google has recognized this behavior as a betrayal of an expectation hardwired into the very functioning of the browser—not merely a discourtesy from an aggressive ad network—and has classified it as spam in the full sense of the term. The responsibility is yours, even if you don’t write the code: this is a point worth emphasizing because it’s the reason why many sites might find themselves in violation without intending to. Google explicitly states that the site is responsible even when the behavior stems from third-party components—JavaScript libraries, ad network scripts, engagement widgets, or exit-intent tools. You can’t say, “I’m not doing it; the advertiser’s script is doing it”: the script loads on your pages, and whatever it does is your responsibility. It’s an extended responsibility that changes how you need to manage your technology stack. Consequences: manual actions or algorithmic demotions, with the potential to impact Google Ads eligibility in the most severe cases. Correction: Conduct a technical audit of your scripts and third-party providers; remove or disable code that interferes with the browser history; systematically test the site’s behavior by clicking the Back button from different pages and different referrers. Introduce a periodic check into your release cycle: this is the kind of problem that can resurface at any moment due to an update from a third-party provider, and if you don’t check for it regularly, you’ll only notice it when Google flags it.

Violations of Google News and Discover Policies

In addition to the four classic categories, the Manual Actions report covers a set of violations specific to sites featured in Google News and Discover. Here, the logic is different from the technical manual actions we’ve seen so far: it’s not about index manipulation or improper technical behavior; it’s about content that doesn’t comply with the specific editorial policies of these platforms. A manual action in this category does not affect Google’s general Search, but it does impact the site’s performance on News and Discover—where, for many publishers, a significant portion of their traffic is concentrated. The specific cases covered are:

1. Hazardous content: content that could facilitate serious and immediate harm to people or animals.
2. Coordinated deceptive practices: pages or sites that conceal or misrepresent their identity, ownership, origin, or purpose, including undisclosed financial or editorial relationships.
3. Deceptive practices — good neighbor policies: content that impersonates other organizations or hides information about the entity that created it, including concealing the country of origin and content targeting users in other countries under false pretenses.
4. Deceptive practices — impersonation: pages that pretend to be someone else. Even satirical content must be explicitly disclosed to avoid violating this policy.
5. Deceptive Practices — Misrepresentation of Affiliation: Concealing significant editorial or financial relationships with organizations, governments, or interest groups.
6. Deceptive Practices — Misrepresentation of Location: Concealing or falsifying the country or location of origin of the site.
7. Harassing content: harassment, threats, or the publication of private information that could be used to threaten or discredit someone.
8. Hate speech: discrimination, violence, or intolerance based on race, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristics.
9. Manipulated multimedia content: images, audio, or videos altered to mislead about verifiable facts. Deepfakes, manipulations designed to distort political or civic realities.
10. Medical content: content that contradicts established scientific or medical consensus, miracle cures, information without a scientific basis.
11. Deceptive content: content that promises details it does not deliver, clickbait.
12. Sexually explicit content: images or videos whose primary purpose is to provoke sexual arousal.
13. Terrorist content: promotion or glorification of terrorist or extremist acts.
14. Transparency: lack of information about authors, publication, publisher, or contact details.
15. Violence and graphic content: incitement to violence or deliberately explicit content intended to disgust.
16. Vulgar and blasphemous language: offensive, obscene, or provocative language with no informational value.

The remediation process for these cases is always the same: remove the violating content, update internal editorial policies, and submit a reconsideration request accompanied by evidence of the changes—new editorial guidelines, the composition of the editorial board, and a history of improved practices. Google requires more documentation here than for technical manual actions, because issues of editorial reliability must be demonstrated, not just stated. It’s not enough to write “we’ve revised our policies”; you need to show how.

Manual action, algorithmic drop, and security issues are not the same thing

Let’s revisit a point that needs to be clarified before any diagnosis. Manual actions, algorithmic drops, and security issues are different concepts, with the sole commonality being that they all result in a loss of traffic. However, they have completely different origins, timelines, and resolution procedures. If you confuse them, you’ll build a recovery strategy for a problem you don’t actually have—and waste weeks. It’s worth distinguishing them precisely. A B manual actionB is a specific, notified human intervention. It occurs because someone on Google’s quality team reviewed your site—or part of it—and determined that it violates the Search Essentials. It comes with an explicit notification, a report describing it, a pattern of URLs that tells you where to look, and a procedure for requesting its reversal. It’s the kind of problem where you know exactly what happened and what you need to do. An algorithmic drop is the exact opposite. It happens without warning, without a pattern, and without a procedure. It typically coincides with a core update or a more targeted update, and it means that Google has changed the way it evaluates the relevance of content—not that your site has done anything wrong. It may be that a competitor has simply done a better job, or it may be that the intent behind your queries has changed and your content no longer responds in the same way. There’s no reconsideration request to submit, no violation to correct. You need to figure out what’s changed and decide if and how to recalibrate your strategy. A security issue is yet another matter. It comes with a notification, but in the Security Issues report, not the Manual Actions report. It concerns compromised sites—malware, phishing, unwanted software, hacked pages—and poses a direct risk to users, not a manipulation of the index. Unlike manual actions, it produces effects visible to searchers: warning labels in SERPs, browser interstitials that block access. The fix is technical and involves cleaning up the site even before communicating with Google.

When You Can Truly Call It a Manual Action (and When You Can’t)

The operational difference hinges on a single element: the explicit notification in Search Console. If you open the Manual Actions report and see an active entry, and if you find the corresponding message in the Messages Center, you’re dealing with a manual action, and the path forward is remediation followed by reconsideration. In all other cases—traffic drops without notification, pages silently falling out of the top 10, or ranking fluctuations coinciding with a Google update—it is not a manual action and should not be treated as such. Understanding this point saves a lot of time for those who apply it and wastes a great deal of time for those who ignore it. It’s common to come across sites that have built “penalty recovery” strategies without ever having received a notification, convinced that a drop in traffic coinciding with a core update is the same thing as a manual action. It isn’t. Working as if it were means trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist in the terms you’re approaching it, and losing sight of the real cause—which is likely an algorithmic recalibration requiring a completely different analysis.

Why the risk today isn’t just about “blatant” spam

There’s still a persistent belief among many who manage websites: manual actions target black-hat practitioners, those who buy backlinks in bulk, and those who hide keywords behind CSS. This is only partially true, and it’s a very outdated view of the actual risk. Today, manual actions also affect sites run in good faith—sites that haven’t done anything explicitly wrong but have stopped monitoring certain areas of their digital footprint. The risk comes from third parties operating within your spaces. A corporate blog that accepts external contributions without moderation, a forum you haven’t monitored in months, a comments section where pharmaceutical spam accumulates unchecked, a directory rented to a partner who uses it to publish content that wouldn’t rank on its own. It comes from the external scripts you load on your pages without knowing what they actually do: JavaScript libraries, advertising widgets, engagement plugins, exit-intent tools. It comes from monetization choices that seem harmless—hosting a partner’s content on a subdomain, accepting a white-label agreement—and that Google may interpret as an abuse of your domain’s reputation. The mental shift you need to make is this: your site isn’t just what you write; it’s everything that loads when a user visits your pages. Every external script, every piece of third-party content, every widget you’ve integrated is part of your scope and is evaluated by Google as yours. If you don’t know what it does, you aren’t managing it. If you aren’t managing it, it’s a risk area.

The notification system and damage assessment

The moment you see the alert in Search Console is just the beginning. The trickiest part comes right after, when you need to figure out what the report is really telling you. The temptation to skim through everything quickly is strong: there’s a violation, there’s a name, you need to fix it. In practice, it’s less straightforward. Before taking action, you need a precise diagnosis of the issue, because the same label can affect the site in very different ways. Google provides specific tools to help you do this. It all starts with the Manual Actions report in Google Search Console, which does two complementary things: it alerts you to active actions and keeps a history of past ones. A clean site shows a green checkmark and a confirmation message; an affected site shows the number of active actions and the details of each one. Be careful, however, with one aspect that is often underestimated. The report captures a problem that has already emerged, but it doesn’t always immediately reveal its full extent. The examples help you identify the nature of the violation, not measure its scope on your own. The diagnosis, therefore, isn’t simply a matter of reading the message. It starts there, but then needs to be expanded methodically.

How to Read the Manual Actions Report in Search Console

When an active entry appears in the report, clicking on it opens the details panel, which contains three key elements—the type of violation, the pattern of affected URLs, and sample URLs—and each of these elements serves a specific purpose that’s worth reading carefully because it influences how you configure your response. The violation type tells you which specific issue is being addressed and includes a “Learn more” link that takes you to the relevant documentation with correction instructions. This is the starting point because it defines the type of remediation you need to perform. The URL pattern tells you where to look: it can be a directory—https://tuosito.it/categoria/*—or the phrase “Affects all pages” if the action is site-wide. To reiterate: any example URLs are samples, not a complete list of the affected pages. The action history has two practical uses. The first is when acquiring a domain: before investing in an existing site, it’s always a good idea to check whether it has been subject to manual actions in the past, because any lingering unresolved issues can affect all subsequent work. The second is the handoff between consultants or agencies: whoever takes over a project has the right to know if there have been critical incidents in the site’s history, so as not to chase after a problem they’re unaware of—and on which they might make the wrong decisions. Then there’s the issue of visible damage. The loss of rankings can be immediate or emerge more gradually, depending on how the site distributed visibility and traffic across the affected areas. Here, the classic mistake is to look only at the number of lost visits. A proper diagnosis requires understanding which URLs, which clusters, and which sections of the project have changed status. The report gives you the starting point. The site analysis must do the rest.

Why Sample URLs Aren’t Enough

Usually. Google provides three or four sample URLs in the report, and the temptation is to fix those, submit the reconsideration request, and hope that’s the end of it. It doesn’t work that way, and the reason is technical: during the review process, Google doesn’t just check the example URLs; it checks the entire area indicated by the pattern. If you fix only the examples and leave the rest untouched, your request will be rejected, and you’ll be back to square one—with a few more weeks of delay. The correct approach is different and requires a more thorough analysis. The example URLs help you understand the nature of the problem—that is, what Google is flagging as a violation. Then you must expand your analysis to the entire pattern—if the report mentions /directory/*, that directory must be examined in its entirety—and finally check that the problem isn’t present outside the specified pattern in less obvious forms. The cleanup must be complete before requesting a review; otherwise, you’re just accumulating rejected requests.

What Has Changed Now That Anti-Spam Reports Can Trigger a Manual Review

There’s an update to Google’s documentation that’s worth understanding thoroughly because it changes the risk profile of many sites without them even noticing. Anti-spam reports submitted by users—anyone can fill out the spam report form—can trigger manual action against the reported site. For years, we’ve known that these reports were used solely to feed algorithmic detection systems; today, Google explicitly states that they can lead to direct intervention by a reviewer. There are two practical implications that change the way you need to think about your risk profile. The first concerns the text of the report: when a manual action stems from a report of this type, Google may send the site owner the text written by the reporter verbatim, to provide context on the source of the problem. The reporter remains anonymous unless they have included personal information in the free-form text. The second implication is more strategic: until recently, those operating in gray areas could rely on the slowness of algorithmic systems to stay under the radar for extended periods. Today, the dynamics have changed. An attentive competitor, an outside observer, or an experienced user who identifies problematic behavior can file a report that ends up on a reviewer’s desk. Not all reports result in manual actions, but the channel is formally active, and anyone with gray areas within their scope must realize that they are more exposed than they thought. There is a practical tip that can help. If you receive a manual action notification and the message from Google contains text that is very specific, detailed, and unusually worded, it’s possible that text is part of the original report. Reading it carefully gives you additional insight into the source of the problem and how to craft a targeted response during the reconsideration phase.

Risk Prevention: What and How to Check on Your Site Before Receiving a Manual Action

The right time to address manual actions is before you receive one. Most cases that result in a notification are issues that were visible, monitorable, and correctable weeks or months earlier but were ignored because there was no monitoring process in place. Effective work involves examining the project at the points where a violation can arise, replicate, and remain visible long enough to become a real problem. The more complex the project, the more the risk is spread out. And when it’s spread out, it becomes difficult to detect with a cursory review. However, establishing basic preventive measures takes less time than you might think and yields a very high return: one hour a month of structured auditing is worth weeks of unplanned recovery time.

Signs to Watch for in Search Console

The first source is Search Console itself, even beyond the Manual Actions report. The Messages Center collects notifications about various issues, not just manual actions: security alerts, reports of abnormal crawling patterns, and notifications about changes affecting the site. For an active site, a weekly check is the bare minimum. Skipping the Messages Center means missing alerts that often foreshadow more serious problems. The Security Issues report should be monitored just as frequently because some issues that now fall under manual actions—sneaky mobile redirects, above all—often stem from a site compromise of which the owner is unaware. If the security report flags anomalies, there is a very likely correlation with technical behaviors that will later emerge as manual actions. The Performance report helps detect unusual drops in traffic. When you see a significant drop on specific pages that doesn’t coincide with a known core update, immediately check the status of manual actions and review the Messages Center. It often takes time for the effects of a notification to become fully visible in the metrics, and you may notice the problem from the drop in traffic before you see the notification itself.

Areas of the site that need to be checked more often

Not all areas of your site have the same risk profile. Some areas are inherently more exposed and need to be monitored much more frequently—not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because the likelihood of the risk materializing there is structurally higher. Forums, blog comments, user profiles, and UGC sections are the first critical area. Anyone can post, and UGC spam is one of the most common triggers for manual action. A regular check using the `site:` operator followed by off-topic commercial terms—medications, gambling, illegal streaming, adult content—will reveal what Google has indexed from your open areas before anyone else notices it for you. It’s a test you can do in five minutes and should be repeated monthly on sites with active UGC sections. Indexed internal searches are a second vulnerable area that almost no one considers. If Googlebot crawls and indexes your internal search results pages, they can become an unintended gateway for user-generated spam content, as users exploit the search box to create URLs with arbitrary queries. Use the `site:` command to check what Google has indexed from your search results pages: if you see suspicious combinations, there’s a structural issue that needs to be addressed with `robots.txt` or noindex. Open directories, subdomains, and subfolders managed by partners are currently the most sensitive area due to the policy on site reputation abuse. If there are parts of your domain that aren’t managed by your in-house editorial team—white-label sites, affiliate directories, sections outsourced to third parties—these are the first things to monitor with special care. The risk isn’t just hosting problematic content; it’s that Google might interpret the relationship as a whole as renting out the main domain’s reputation, and the violation falls on you even if someone else produced the content. Pages with aggressive structured markup are another area to review periodically. Structured data is a powerful tool, but even a single non-compliant configuration—a review written by the company itself marked as independent, an event that is actually a promotion, or a JobPosting used improperly—is enough to expose you to a specific manual action. The review here must be comprehensive; it shouldn’t be done on a random basis. Monetized areas—ads, engagement widgets, third-party scripts, affiliate redirects—are the newest frontier of risk, and the least monitored on most sites. External scripts can introduce behavior you don’t see: manipulation of the browser history, conditional redirects on mobile, generation of artificial links, injection of content that doesn’t match what Googlebot crawls. A periodic inventory of every script loaded on your pages, verifying what each one does, is a technical exercise that may lack glamour but is absolutely essential today.

Technical and Content Audit of the Most Vulnerable Areas

When conducting an audit, it’s helpful to distinguish between structure and content, with a periodic audit of the most vulnerable areas to identify risks before they materialize. This audit should be structured around three dimensions: link profile, technical health, and content quality. On the technical front, it’s advisable to check redirects, scripts, plugins, third-party-loaded assets, markup, mobile variants, discrepancies between versions of the same page, template behavior, and all parts of the site that could alter what is displayed or how the user navigates. On the content side, the focus shifts to UGC, third-party content, affiliate pages, editorial sections for Discover and News, and profiles or articles that add little or nothing to what’s already circulating online. Regarding the link profile, look for anomalous patterns. A sudden surge in backlinks from low-quality domains, unusual concentrations of exact-match commercial anchor text, geographic origins of links that don’t align with your market, and TLDs typically associated with spam links in referring domains—these are all signals that need to be checked before they trigger a manual action. The audit should be conducted at regular intervals, not just when the site is growing—some spam links arrive as “negative SEO attacks” from competitors and most often target rising sites that are singled out precisely because of their growth. Regarding technical health, a full site scan allows you to verify that no configuration is generating suspicious signals. Status codes, redirect chains, resources blocked from the crawler that should be accessible, discrepancies between what the user sees and what Googlebot fetches, and indexable directories that shouldn’t be: these are all situations that, on their own, do not trigger a manual action, but which, when combined, paint a picture of a “manipulative” site for those conducting manual reviews. Regarding content quality, the audit is more qualitative and requires human review. However, it can be supported by quantitative data. Pages that rank for keywords but have minimal traffic may be considered thin content; pages with duplicate intent compared to others on the site can create cannibalization, which in some cases overlaps with the quality issue; sudden drops in traffic that don’t correspond to known core updates may be signs that something has changed in how Google evaluates those pages. None of this data, on its own, is proof. But together, they paint a risk map worth exploring.

How to Use SEOZoom for Proactive Management

SEOZoom covers the three dimensions of the audit with dedicated tools. They do not replace your judgment—there is no tool that will tell you “you have thin content” with an automatic checkmark and precise, perfect alignment with reality—but they provide you with the data on which to base that judgment and relieve you of the heaviest data-gathering workload. In the link profile, you’ll find the Backlink Analysis and the Backlinks section within projects. The Backlink Profile dashboard shows you the total number of links and referring domains, the distribution between DoFollow and NoFollow links, backlinks from homepages, and DA and PA metrics. Three views in particular work well for detecting anomalous patterns: the Backlink TLD focus, which shows you the distribution by top-level domain and highlights anomalous concentrations on TLDs associated with link spam; the Backlink Geolocation, which shows you which countries the links come from and flags incongruous origins; the Anchor Text section, which ranks the anchors used by percentage, allowing you to identify suspicious concentrations of exact-match commercial anchors. The Backlink Quality view groups links by Zoom Authority of the referring domains, giving you a concise qualitative overview of the profile. And the Link Monitor lets you manually add strategic backlinks and receive notifications if they’re removed or modified — useful for monitoring links you’ve worked on over time. For technical health, the main tool is the SEO Spider, which performs a complete scan of the site by simulating Googlebot’s behavior, traversing internal links, and detecting structural errors, missing tags, HTML code issues, and inaccessible resources. The results are filtered into Errors (critical issues that hinder indexing) and Warnings (areas for improvement), with details for each URL on status codes, robots directives, meta tags, headings, images, and internal and external links. The tree map (Crawl Tree) allows you to view the site’s hierarchy and identify open sections, unmonitored subfolders, and areas managed by partners that are beyond your direct control. JavaScript rendering is available on the Business and Corporate plans, which is essential for sites built with modern frameworks where content is rendered on the client side. Use the Spider after releases, migrations, refactoring, or structural changes, but also on a regular basis as a preventive audit: many problematic situations develop slowly and are only discovered through periodic checks. On higher-tier plans, the automatic SEO Audit transforms the scan into a comprehensive report with a summary of issues and actionable recommendations, useful for sharing the analysis with teams and stakeholders or for formalizing work with the client. When it comes to performance and quality monitoring, multiple tools work together, and the most interesting indicator from a preventive standpoint is a specific metric: wasted crawl budget, found under Page Performance, which identifies the percentage of very low-performing pages that unnecessarily consume Google’s crawl resources. It’s an indirect indicator of potentially widespread thin content, guiding your subsequent manual review. The Negative Trend view groups pages that have experienced declines in the recent period and highlights the keywords that have lost rankings: it’s a useful alert system for taking action before a decline worsens. The Cannibalization tool shows you pages on the same site that compete for the same keywords, along with an overlap percentage. The Time Machine feature allows you to compare the domain’s status on two different dates, showing you which keywords and pages have gained or lost visibility during that period: it’s particularly useful after core updates to distinguish algorithmic effects from any structural issues that had already arisen.

Where vigilance wanes, risk creeps in

With SEOZoom, you can better identify your project’s vulnerabilities and establish more continuous monitoring of its structure and off-page signals

Activate your SEOZoom free trial

Finally, a word about the most recent aspect of monitoring: AI-generated content. AI Visibility, GEO Audit, and AEO Audit let you see how your brand performs in the responses of generative AI models. These tools aren’t specifically designed to detect manual actions, but they provide useful reputational context: a noticeable distortion in how generative AI engines perceive your brand is often accompanied by other signs of weakness in your digital footprint, and it’s worth analyzing them together.

How to Correct a Manual Action Credibly

If you’ve received a notification, the sequence of steps you take makes the difference between a quick recovery and months of rejected requests. The logic of the Google reviewer is easy to understand once you’ve clearly visualized it: they want to verify that you’ve understood the problem, that you’ve taken it seriously, and that the site is now in compliance. Three operational steps form the core of your response.

1. Start with the report and expand your review to cover the entire scope. The report gives you the starting point—the type of violation, the URL pattern, some examples—not the end point. What you need is a complete map of all pages in violation, both within and around the stated pattern. The most common mistake, as already mentioned, is to limit the work to the URLs explicitly cited. Google checks the entire area during the reconsideration phase, and a partial fix will lead straight to rejection.
2. Remove the violation; don’t hide it. Here, the temptation to resort to cosmetic solutions often arises: setting problematic pages to “noindex,” redirecting them to other URLs, changing names and folders, or moving them to different sections. These are all shortcuts that Google recognizes, and in certain cases—site reputation abuse being the prime example—they are explicitly identified as attempts to circumvent the policy and may result in broader actions rather than resolving the current issue. The request is clear: remove unnatural links, clean up spam, correct deceptive markup, remove or disable problematic scripts, and eliminate or modify third-party content that exploits the domain’s reputation. There are no workarounds that bypass the reconsideration process.
3. Verify that Google can still access the pages. This is an operational detail that the official documentation explicitly emphasizes, yet very few people pay attention to. The URLs you’ve corrected must not be behind a login, blocking paywalls, robots.txt directives that prevent access, or noindex meta tags. During the review process, the crawler must be able to verify that the page exists and has been cleaned up. If the page is inaccessible, the reviewer cannot verify anything, and your request will be rejected on technical grounds without even addressing the substance of the remediation.

Resolution Procedure and Reconsideration Request

Once the remediation is complete, the next step is to submit the reconsideration request via the “Request Review” button in the Manual Actions report. This is the only official channel for communication with Google at this stage, and the quality of the request has a huge impact on the outcome. A successful request does three specific things: it explains precisely what the quality issue was, describes the resolution process applied, and documents the outcome with verifiable evidence. This is not the time to downplay the violation or to construct contextual narratives that justify what happened. The reviewer wants to understand what you did, on which URLs, and with what result—not the philosophical underpinnings. Before-and-after screenshots, a list of the URLs you addressed, references to links that were removed or added to the disavow file, and confirmation of passed technical tests: this is the kind of evidence that turns a statement into proof. The tone must be professional, concise, and focused on the work done. Long-winded and self-justifying requests are almost always counterproductive. A well-crafted request does not need to exceed 500 characters unless it is to describe a broad scope that requires structured documentation.

How to Write a Reconsideration Request That Doesn’t Feel Like a Formality

While writing, keep these three practical questions in mind. When should you submit it? Only once the work is complete. If the issue involves twenty directories and you’ve corrected fifteen, the request is premature and will be rejected. Furthermore, Google explicitly asks that you not resubmit the request before receiving the final decision on the previous one: early resubmissions lengthen the review queue instead of speeding it up. What must it contain? Three non-negotiable elements. The first is proof that you’ve understood the problem—not a generic restatement of it, but a specific description of the violation in your case. The second is the specific steps you’ve taken, described in detail and linked to precise URLs and actions. The third is the documented outcome, with verifiable evidence that the problem no longer exists. Without one of these three, the request is incomplete. How long does it take? The duration varies. Google states “a few days or weeks”; for requests regarding link issues, the timeframe is typically longer, because analyzing the backlink profile is much more complex than verifying the content of individual pages. Waiting is part of the process, and during this time you’ll receive two notifications: confirmation that your request has been received upon submission, and the final decision upon closure. If the decision is positive, the action is reversed, and the site begins the organic recovery phase—which is a separate process that takes longer than the reversal itself. If the decision is negative, Google typically provides guidance on the unresolved issues, and the process starts over from the analysis phase.

The Most Common Mistakes That Make the Situation Worse

Certain mistakes occur regularly among those facing a manual action for the first time, and they significantly prolong the recovery time. Knowing them in advance helps you avoid making them.

1. Fixing only the sample URLs. The URLs that Google lists in the report are samples, not the complete list. Fixing only those and submitting the request will consistently result in a rejection—it’s the most common mistake and also the most costly in terms of wasted time.
2. Shifting the problem instead of removing it. Setting problematic pages to “noindex,” redirecting them elsewhere, moving them to a subdomain, or changing their folder: these are solutions that Google recognizes as attempts to circumvent the fix. In certain cases, such as site reputation abuse, Google explicitly states that moving a page to a subfolder on the same domain is considered evasion and may result in additional actions rather than resolving the current issue.
3. Requesting a review too soon. Submitting a request before you’ve completed the remediation—or worse, resubmitting it before Google has decided on the previous one—has the opposite effect of what you hope for: the review queue gets longer, the site remains under manual action for longer, and the reviewer accumulates negative signals regarding your site management.
4. Confusing an SEO drop with a manual action. Without a notification in Search Console, there is no manual action. Building a “penalty recovery” strategy for an issue that is actually algorithmic, technical, or due to a change in user intent means working in the wrong direction for weeks. Before taking any action, check Search Console for a notification. It’s the filter that precedes everything else.

How to Reduce Risk Over Time

The ultimate goal isn’t to know how to handle a manual action when it arrives; it’s to build a site where the risk of receiving one is structurally low. Zero risk isn’t achievable, but “structurally low” risk is—and it comes down to three ongoing practices.

• Strengthen the site’s technical, editorial, and commercial governance. Knowing what the scripts you upload do, understanding the partners who manage portions of your domain, having written editorial policies for UGC, and monitoring monetized areas: these are practices that stem from governing the site as a system, not as a sum of independent components. Governance is the first investment that reduces structural risk.
• Monitor the most vulnerable areas periodically. UGC, internal searches, subdomains, third-party directories, and advertising scripts: these are the most common sources of risk, and regular monitoring is the best way to catch them in time. One hour a month of structured auditing is worth weeks of unplanned recovery time when a problem escalates.
• Treat manual actions as a symptom, not as an incident. If a manual action is issued, it almost always stems from a structural weakness that must be addressed at its root. Correcting the specific violation is only the first step. The second is to understand why it happened and modify the processes that allowed it to occur, so you don’t end up dealing with the same problem twice.

A site that operates this way isn’t immune, but it approaches risk from a completely different perspective: with tools at the ready, a clear understanding of its scope, and processes that enable rapid remediation and credible communication with Google. It’s the difference between suffering an incident and managing it.