Google’s manual actions and interventions to solve issues
It is one of the worst nightmares of anyone who owns or operates a site: we wake up one morning to find that traffic has suddenly plummeted. We are not talking about a small drop, but a real spike downward. What happened? One of the possible causes is having done something wrong, resulting in one of the dreaded search engine penalties, namely Google’s manual actions. At first glance, this concept seems obscure and causes doubt, concern, or real fear, not least because the reasons for the penalties can sometimes seem mysterious: in fact, the problem is that there is often a lack of awareness about what is happening to the site. To clear the field of uncertainty, it is good to know the list of misbehaviors that can cause a manual action by Google, the type of sanction that affects sites and pages that are found to be non-compliant with Google’s guidelines, which aim to provide users with positive experiences and clean and useful SERPs.
What are Google’s manual actions and what problems they cause
A manual action is essentially a penalty that Google imposes on a website. This penalty is applied when Google’s Search Quality Team, during a manual review of the site, finds that search engine guidelines have been violated, such as through the use of unethical SEO techniques, such as implementing hidden links or overuse of keywords, or overtly spammy techniques.
Manual actions can have a significant impact on our site: they usually cause a worsening of the ranking of the offending pages or the entire site or, in the worst cases, the possible omission from the results, without any visual indication for the user. That is, it is the dreaded de-indexing of the site, which is then excluded from the Index and will no longer appear in Google search results.
However, it is important to note that a manual action is not a death sentence for our site: Google provides detailed information about the problem and gives us opportunities to fix them and then ask for a review. If the changes made are satisfactory, the manual action can be revoked and our site can return to the search results.
What manual actions are for and why they exist
According to Google’s official guidance, manual actions were introduced to ensure that websites comply with the search engine’s guidelines, to ensure fair competition among websites, and to protect users from harmful or misleading content, and in fact in most cases they aim to curb attempts to manipulate the search index.
Indeed, since the origins of SEO, there have been actors who have tried to climb the digital heights (or simply the search engine rankings) using fraudulent methods: these practices not only bury the most relevant content under a mountain of irrelevant results, but also make it harder for legitimate websites to get noticed.
And so, manual actions serve to protect the integrity of search results and ensure a high quality user experience, helping Google meet its overall “mission” and refine and improve its Search.
To do this, Google takes a data-driven approach and relies on the work of analysts, researchers and statisticians, who constantly assess the quality of search and also collaborate on appropriate changes to Goo