Manual actions, the useful tools in Google Search Console
Let’s go back to focusing on manual actions and the risks of penalization that a site violating Google rules can face: the theme is very delicate and we saw just a few days ago how much attention the US company devotes to the fight against spam to clean up its search result pages and offer users positive experiences.
A focus on manual actions against the site
To guide us in this lesson is the new appointment with the Google Search Console Training series, in which Daniel Waisberg sheds light on a tool contained in the Google Search Console: today we discover something more about the manual actions report, to know what to do if our site is affected by a problem of manual actions that could affect its performance or even its presence in SERP.
Google’s effort against spam and manipulations
“Google is constantly working to improve Search”, says Waisberg at the start of the video, which is why changes to the search engine algorithms are subject to a detailed qualitative assessment prior to the official release. The algorithms are excellent in identifying spam and, in most cases, intervene automatically to delete it from the results pages.
To further improve the quality of search results, Google scans specific sites that do not comply with the policies and guidelines (the quality standards for webmasters): in these cases, a human being can analyze the site and eventually decree a manual action. When this happens, a part or the entire site will lose positions in the rankings or even be excluded and not shown in Google search results.
Types of manual action
The list of possible problems that generates a manual action includes several prohibited or incorrect interventions and techniques, such as:
- Spam generated by users.
- Free host containing spam.
- Problem with structured data.
- Unnatural links leading to the site.