Manual Review?
What is a Manual Review?
Manual Review is the process in which a human reviewer from Google’s Webspam or quality team inspects websites to check if there are any violations of Google’s search essential guidelines. If violations are found, it leads to a manual penalty.
What triggers a Manual Review ?
- When users report a website as spam
- When Google notices any suspicious patterns
- Random quality checks
- Reconsideration after a manual penalty is given
What all are checked in a Manual Review?
- Quality of the content: Checks whether the content is scraped, valuable or relevant.
- Keywords: Checks if there is over usage of keywords.
- Spam: Detects if there are any unnatural links.
- Cloaking: Detects whether the content shown to the user and the search engine is the same or not.
- User Experience: Assess the quality of website design and usability.
Impacts of Manual Review on websites
On legitimate websites :
- Helps to improve content quality and site design.
- Gets guidance to create minor issues.
- Can strengthen trust with the search engine.
Also, if some issues like keyword stuffing are found;
- Manual warning is issued.
- Slight drop in rankings.
- Traffic decreases until issues are found.
On spam websites :
- Manual penalty will be issued
- Drop in rankings, may even get removed from the Google index
- Revenue loss
- Damaged reputation among clients and partners
- Loss of traffic
- Consumes time and effort for reconsideration
Why are Manual Reviews conducted?
Manual Reviews take much more time compared to automated reviews. Still, manual reviews are conducted. The reasons why manual reviews are preferred over automated reviews are :
- Human reviewers can find subtle issues which automated systems fail to recognize.
- Can provide guidance on correcting mistakes.