Google Manual Actions: Types, Causes, and How to Submit a Reconsideration Request

A manual action is a penalty applied by a person, not by an algorithm. Google’s Manual Actions report help defines it this way: Google issues one “when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google’s spam policies”. Because a person applied it, there is a record of it. A site with a manual action sees it listed in the Manual Actions report in Search Console and receives a notification. A site without an entry in that report does not have a manual action, whatever its traffic graph looks like.

How to confirm whether you have one

Open the Manual Actions report in Search Console for the affected property. Each action listed there shows:

• the type of action (for example, “Unnatural links to your site”);
• the patterns of affected pages, which Google says “can be a subset of your site, or the entire site”;
• recommended actions specific to that type.

Google also notes that “Not all of the pages matching the pattern are necessarily affected”, so the pattern is a scope description, not a list of every penalized URL.

If the report shows no issues, the cause of a traffic change lies elsewhere: algorithmic updates, technical problems, security issues or changes in demand. Google’s traffic-drop guide lists these as separate diagnoses (debugging Search traffic drops). Traffic loss alone does not prove a manual action exists.

The Security Issues report is a different report. Hacked content and malware warnings appear there, not in Manual Actions, and a site can have entries in one, both or neither.

The types of manual actions

The Manual Actions report help lists the action types with their causes and fixes. Grouped by what they concern:

Links

• Unnatural links to your site: a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive or manipulative inbound links.
• Unnatural links from your site: the outbound counterpart, concerning links the site itself places.

Content quality and manipulation

• Thin content with little or no added value.
• Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing.
• Major spam problems: Google describes this as a site that “appears to use aggressive spam techniques such as scaled content abuse, cloaking, and/or other repeated or egregious violations”.
• Site reputation policy: a portion of the site hosts third-party content inconsistent with the site reputation abuse policy.

Third-party and user content

• Site abused with third-party spam.
• User-generated spam: spam in comments, forums or profiles.
• Spammy free host: concerns free hosting services and the spam hosted on them.

Deception between users and Google

• Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects.
• Cloaked images.
• Sneaky mobile redirects.
• AMP content mismatch.

Structured data

• Structured data issue: markup that violates Google’s structured data guidelines. Google’s structured data guidelines say this kind of action removes eligibility for rich results and “doesn’t affect how the page ranks in Google web search”.

News and Discover

• News and Discover policy violations, with subtypes such as dangerous content, harassment, manipulated media and misleading content. These affect eligibility for those surfaces.

Site reputation actions and the EEA

One type now behaves differently by region. On August 28, 2026, Google announced that beginning August 30, manual actions under its site reputation policy “will have a different effect for those searching in the EEA than outside of it” (Google’s August 2026 announcement).

• Outside the European Economic Area, the action “will directly affect search results for the portion of the site affected”, and the announcement adds that the rest of the site won’t be affected. The Manual Actions help page qualifies this: a site that is repeatedly inconsistent with the policy may face further manual actions or an effect on its overall ranking.
• Inside the EEA, “the impact of the manual action won’t apply”, and the affected section may be separated in Google’s systems so that over time it ranks independently from the rest of the site.

The Manual Actions help page repeats this: “The impact of the manual action doesn’t apply to search results shown to users in the European Economic Area (EEA)”. The action is still issued and still appears in Search Console; the policy still exists in the EEA; only the effect on EEA results differs. Other manual action types are not affected by this change.

How to fix and request review

The steps are the same pattern across types, with type-specific details in the report.

1. Read the action and its affected patterns. Identify the policy and the scope.
2. Fix every affected page. Google states: “Fixing the issue on just some pages will not earn you a partial return to search results”. If there are several actions, fix all of them.
3. Make sure Google can reach the fixed pages. Google says affected pages “should not require a login, be behind a paywall, or be blocked by robots.txt or a noindex directive”. URL Inspection confirms access.
4. Document what you did. For link actions, keep the outreach log; for content actions, keep examples of removed and replaced content.
5. Select Request Review in the Manual Actions report.

What a reconsideration request should contain

Google says a good request does three things: explains the exact quality issue, describes the steps taken to fix it, and documents the outcome. For specific types it asks for more:

• Unnatural links to your site: documentation of links removed and an explanation of links you could not remove. Google adds: “Blindly adding all backlinks to the disavow file is not considered a good-faith effort, and will not be enough to make your reconsideration request successful.”
• Thin content, unnatural outbound links, major spam: examples of bad content removed and good content added.
• A site bought from someone else: say that you recently acquired the site and that it no longer violates the policies.

A request template that follows Google’s three points:

Issue: Unnatural links to example.com (manual action received 2026-09-14).
The site paid for 312 guest posts with keyword anchors between 2023 and 2025.

Steps taken:
- Contacted all 312 publishers between 2026-09-15 and 2026-10-20 (log attached).
- 241 links removed, 38 changed to rel="sponsored".
- 33 links on 29 domains could not be removed; owners did not reply.
  Those domains are in the disavow file uploaded 2026-10-22.
- Ended the vendor contract; no paid placements since 2025-11.

Outcome:
- 279 of 312 links removed or qualified; remainder disavowed.
- Updated link policy for the marketing team attached.

The figures are illustrative. Use your own counts and dates, and attach the evidence.

What happens next

Google says most reconsideration reviews “can take several days or weeks”, and link-related requests may take longer. You receive an email when the request is received and another when the review is complete. Google asks site owners not to resubmit while a request is pending. If the review succeeds, the action is revoked; if not, the response explains what remains.

What a revoked action does and does not mean

Revocation removes the manual penalty. It does not restore rankings to a previous level automatically, because the site’s position is again determined by Google’s ordinary ranking systems, and any value that came from the violating practice (paid links, scaled pages) is gone. Plan the recovery around the content and links that remain.

Manual actions vs other causes of decline

A core update or spam update is not a manual action, even when it causes a large drop. Google’s spam updates page says that improvements after an algorithmic spam update may take months as automated systems learn that a site complies (Google on spam updates), and there is no reconsideration request for an algorithmic change.

Preventing the next one

• Keep a record of link-building vendors and what they did.
• Moderate user-generated content and block known spam patterns.
• Review any third-party content hosted on the site for consistency with the site reputation policy.
• Validate structured data against what is visible on the page.
• Monitor the Manual Actions and Security Issues reports as part of routine checks.

A manual action is an explicit message from Google to a site owner. It names the policy, shows the scope and offers a route back. Treat it as a specification for what to fix, and treat its absence as a reason to look for a different cause.