Manual action is the SEO term that refers to a penalty imposed by the search engines for violating the webmaster guidelines. As a rule, most of these violations refer to the result of black hat SEO methods and result in decreasing the visibility of a site’s specific pages or the website itself.
Manual action doesn’t refer to any search engine’s algorithm changes, like Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, or the others (for Google). Instead, they’re the most simple and notable ways of penalizing websites for spammy behavior. The manual actions that can lead to penalties in Google search engine usually include the following:
- Unnatural links from/to your site (black-hat linkbuilding strategy)
- Hacked site
- Thin content (the content with no value)
- Doorway pages
- Pure spam
- User-generated spam
- Cloaking and sneaky redirects
- Hidden text and keyword stuffing
- Spammy freehosts
- Spammy structured markup
The main goal of manual action is to prevent the SEO tactics that do not follow the webmaster’s guidelines and can lead to any kind of search engine algorithm manipulation by improving the site’s ranking positions in SERP.
To check manual actions in Google, you should sign in to Google Search Console, go to your site’s property, check the Security & Manual Actions section and open the Manual actions report.
