More sites are getting hand-issued Google penalties
One well known SEO says the penalties are landing on ordinary businesses, not just obvious spam sites.
Marie Haynes (@marie_haynes), a long time SEO consultant, says she has had a big increase in requests for help with manual actions. A manual action is a penalty applied by a person at Google rather than by an algorithm, and it can push a site down or out of search results entirely.
The penalties she is seeing fall into three buckets. Thin content, which means pages with little real substance. Pure spam. And scaled content, which means pages mass produced in bulk. The detail that stands out is who is getting them. In her words, most of these sites are legitimate long standing businesses, not throwaway spam operations.
Most of these sites are legitimate long standing businesses.
Why she thinks Google is doing this
Haynes says the pattern reminds her of 2011 and early 2012, when Google handed out a wave of manual actions for unnatural links. That was followed by the launch of Penguin in April 2012, an algorithmic demotion that hit sites automatically rather than one by one.
She gives two reasons she believes Google issues manual actions in bulk. First, to find examples that can be used to train machine learning systems that eventually run algorithmically. Second, to learn from reconsideration requests, since getting a penalty lifted usually means admitting what tactics you were using.
Her conclusion is that a large update is coming. Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) replied to the post with an eyes emoji and nothing else, which is agreement of a sort but not a second account of the same data.
This is one person's view of her own inbox. Google has not confirmed any increase in manual actions, and Haynes does not give a number. Treat it as a signal from someone who does this work, not as a measured trend. It does sit alongside Google's own statement that more spam crackdowns are on the way.
What to do
Check whether you have one. Open Google Search Console, look in the left menu for Manual actions, and click it. If it says no issues detected, you are fine and there is nothing else to do today.
If you do have a penalty, the notice names the problem. Fix the pages it points at, then file a reconsideration request from that same screen.
If you have ever published a batch of near identical pages with a town name or a service word swapped in, those are the pages to look at first. One genuinely useful page beats fifty built from a template.
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.