Google is handing out more human penalties right now
Two well known consultants say requests for help with Google penalties have jumped over the past several weeks.
Google appears to be issuing more manual actions than usual. A manual action is a penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google, not by an algorithm, and it can push a site down or out of search results entirely.
Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) reported that Lily Ray and Marie Haynes are both seeing more manual actions over the past several weeks. Marie Haynes said she is getting more requests for help with them. Lily Ray listed what she is seeing as "Pure spam, thin affiliation and even scaled content abuse".
Pure spam, thin affiliation and even scaled content abuse
What is getting hit
Haynes said the most common one she sees is "major spam problems", which she says is what Google used to call "pure spam". That label means a site broke more than one of Google's spam rules at once.
She said scaled content is very common. That is pages churned out in bulk with no real answer on them, like near duplicate pages with a word swapped. She has also seen suspected doorway abuse, which she described as having pages to target every possible city or query combination. Think of a plumber with a thousand near identical pages, one for each town name.
She added that she has not seen unnatural links penalties recently, but most of the sites hit with "major spam problems" had also clearly been building links in ways that break Google's guidelines.
Getting one undone is slow
If you get a manual action, you fix the problem and file a reconsideration request, which is an appeal asking Google to review the site again. Haynes said a reply generally takes a few weeks and sometimes months.
"It is very common to fail the reconsideration request. Often sites will need several of them."
So this is not a quick fix. Plan for weeks of lost traffic, not days.
Why it may be happening
Nobody has confirmed a reason. Haynes offered a theory that manual actions help Google train its systems to handle these things automatically, and that if true, future updates would do more to catch scaled content and other ranking tricks on their own.
What to do
Open Google Search Console, click Security and Manual Actions, then Manual actions. If it says "No issues detected", you are clear and there is nothing to do.
If you have ever published pages in bulk from a template, or a batch of near identical city pages, look at them with fresh eyes. The question Google is asking is whether each page actually answers something for a real person. One well researched page beats fifty spun ones, and right now the spun ones are the ones drawing a human reviewer's attention.
It is very common to fail the reconsideration request. Often sites will need several of them.
My theory is that manual actions help Google train systems to handle these things algorithmically.
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.