Google penalties are now hitting ordinary businesses
Several SEOs say the wave of hand-issued Google penalties is landing on normal companies, not just obvious spam sites.
Google is handing out far more manual actions, and the sites getting hit are not all spam farms. A manual action is a penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google rather than by an algorithm. Marie Haynes says she has had a big increase in requests for help with them, covering thin content, pure spam and scaled content, and that most of these sites are legitimate long standing businesses. That is the new part, and it follows earlier reports of the same rise.
What the penalties look like
Daniel Foley Carter says he has been seeing more and more of them pop up over the last few months, and that the damage is not gentle. He says manual actions can bring entire sites down, with some losing 90% or more of their traffic overnight. He blames businesses cutting SEO spend because AI could do it, and lower end SEOs turning to scale.
The list he published of penalties showing in Search Console includes thin content with little or no added value, unnatural links to and from a site, hidden text and keyword stuffing, cloaking, user generated spam in comments and forums, and structured data that describes hidden or misleading content. Several of those can happen to a normal small business site without anyone meaning to break a rule, especially spam posted in comment sections.
Why Haynes thinks this is a warning sign
Haynes compares the current wave to 2011 and early 2012, when Google went wild handing out manual actions for unnatural links. What followed was Penguin in April 2012, an algorithmic demotion that applied the same judgement automatically across the web. Her reading is that Google uses manual actions to gather training examples and to learn from reconsideration requests, where site owners usually have to admit what tactics they used.
She thinks a big update is still on its way. Lily Ray added that people only start caring about this after they have been hit, and by then it is often too late.
What to do
Open Google Search Console, click Security and Manual actions in the left menu, and check that it says no issues detected. If you have a comments section, a forum or user profiles, look at what has been posted there recently and delete the spam. If you have pages built from a template with one word swapped per page, those are the ones at risk, not your regular articles.
And I think it may be quite shocking for sites that have thrived more on SEO knowledge than truly being the most helpful and reliable.
In my experience people only start caring about this stuff after they鈥檝e been hit, and by then it鈥檚 often too late.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.