Manual Penalty
What is a Manual Penalty?
A manual penalty/manual action is an action taken by Google’s human reviewers against websites that violate Google Search essential guidelines. Unlike algorithmic penalties (automatic and triggered by algorithms), this is applied manually after a human review. Manual penalty is imposed on websites that use manipulative SEO tactics.
Reasons for Manual Penalty
- Scraped content from other websites
- Misusing schema markup to mislead engines
- Doorway Pages (Creating multiple similar pages to rank for specific queries and making the users reach the same destination)
- Adding unnatural links to your website
- Showing different content to search engines and visitors
- Overusing keywords to manipulate search rankings
How it affects a website
- Website rankings decline sharply or may even be removed from Google’s index
- Google Search Console publishes the manual action notice detailing the issue
- Fall in reputation
- Advantage for your competitors
How to recover from a manual penalty
- Inspect the manual penalty notice and the violation charges.
- Remove unnatural and spammy links after conducting a link audit.
- Avoid keyword stuffing.
- Add valuable content.
- Submit a reconsideration request.