A manual action is a penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google rather than an algorithm. Here is how to check, what triggers one and how to get it lifted.
A manual action is a penalty applied to your site by a human reviewer at Google, not by an algorithm. Someone looked at your site, decided it broke the spam policies, and demoted or removed it from the results.
You will know if you have one. Google tells you in Search Console, under Security and Manual Actions. If that page says “No issues detected”, you do not have a manual action and your traffic problem is something else.
Manual action or algorithmic drop
People use “penalty” for both and it causes no end of confusion. The difference matters because the fix is completely different.
A manual action is a notice in Search Console, a specific named violation, and a defined route back through a reconsideration request. An algorithmic drop is silent. Nothing appears in Search Console, the timing usually lines up with a core update, and there is no appeal. You improve the site and wait for the next assessment.
Check Search Console first. It takes thirty seconds and it decides everything you do next.
What triggers one
The common causes on sites we take over:
- Unnatural links to your site. Bought links, private blog networks, or a previous agency hitting a monthly link quota. Easily the most common.
- Unnatural links from your site. Selling links that pass ranking signals, or a hacked page quietly linking out to gambling sites.
- Thin content with little added value. Scraped pages, doorway pages, auto generated text, mass produced location pages with only the town name changed.
- User generated spam. Comment sections and forums left unmoderated and filled with spam links.
- Cloaking or sneaky redirects. Showing Google something different from what visitors see.
- Structured data issues. Review markup on pages with no reviews, or FAQ markup on content that is not a question and answer.
Actions can be sitewide or partial. A partial action hits specific pages or sections, which is why traffic sometimes falls off a cliff in one area while the rest of the site carries on normally.
Getting it lifted
Four steps, and the third one is where most people fail.
Read the notice to see exactly what was flagged and whether it applies to the whole site. Fix the underlying problem properly, which means removing or disavowing the links, deleting or rewriting the thin pages, cleaning the hack. Then document the work: a shared sheet showing every URL you contacted, what happened, and what you disavowed. Finally, file the reconsideration request and explain what went wrong, what you changed, and what stops it happening again.
Reviewers reject requests that read like a plea. They approve requests that read like an incident report. Expect one to three weeks for a decision and be prepared to go round twice.
If the site you inherited has a history nobody can explain, our technical SEO team can work out which of the two problems you actually have before anyone writes a disavow file.
Related reading: our guides to SEO audits, search visibility, removing URLs from Google and recovering lost SEO visibility.
Common questions
How do I check if I have a manual action?
Open Search Console, go to Security and Manual Actions, then Manual Actions. Any active penalty is listed there with the violation type and the affected pages. Nothing listed means no manual action.
How long does recovery take?
The review itself takes days to a few weeks. Rankings returning is slower, often a month or two after the action is lifted, and they do not always return to exactly where they were.
Can a manual action expire on its own?
Some do expire after a set period, but relying on that is a bad plan. The behaviour that caused it will usually trigger another, and you lose all that traffic in the meantime.
Will disavowing links fix it?
For a link based action, disavowing is part of it, but Google wants to see genuine removal effort too. Uploading a file without contacting any site owners frequently leads to a rejected request.
See our glossary entry for manual action for the short version.
