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Manual actions are Google's way of punishing, demoting, or removing websites from its search index if they are found to be in violation of the Googling webmaster's guidelines. Most manual actions are imposed when an attempt to manipulate search index pages is reported to Google's search console because a page or the rank of the page is not taken into account in the results. Manual actions hide text and keyword stuff that happens when Google discovers that a keyword page is not displayed to users due to excessive use of a keyword or site optimization.

Google employs thousands of content or site reviewers to check that a site follows Google's webmaster quality guidelines to determine which sites trigger manual action. Google Acts are similar to the human review process, so it issues this kind of penalities (though they don't like to call it a punishment) to websites by content reviewers when they find pages on a website to be incompatible with Google's webmaster guidelines.

What is Google Manual Action?

Google Manual Actions occurs when you are trying to manipulate search engine index using black hat methods. So that it violates google webmaster guidelines like over-optimization of keywords, duplicate content, fake review count on-site with false data, spam backlinks, and other black hat techniques will cause manual actions.

Multiple breaches will be assessed more closely and trigger a manual penalty, branding the site a repeat offender. From the point of view of online business, manual penalties represent an incalculable risk to the performance of a website but appear to have little impact on the organic visibility of a website. It is possible that the impact of the penalty will be felt over time due to factors such as technical setup, changes to Google policies, increased competition, and search flow.

Participating in a link scheme with the sole purpose of improving your PageRank or website position in Google search results can lead to manual actions that are difficult to fix. While Google offers simple guidelines for its manual actions and alerts sites of possible penalties in the search console, dealing with such situations remains a difficult task for site owners without SEO knowledge. Still, manual penalties for Web sites do not mean doom for future search visibility prospects.

Causes of Google Manual Action

Whatever strategy you use to get lots of links and better Google rankings, your site can be punished. Comments and forum posts that are created for the purpose of linking to your website may also be punished.

Websites that are penalized or prohibited by Google - If you have backlinks to sites that violate Google's policies, you must remove them. 
Duplicate Content Websites - If the duplicate content websites are of poor quality, you should avoid links to them. 
Advertorials - Only Google-sponsored content can reach the PageRank.

This recommended measure ensures that AMP references to canonical websites are correct. If AMP content does not match, this manual action will not affect your rankings, as Google will remove the AMP version of the website from AMP's mobile search results and display the original website. This recommended measure ensures that your site shows the same images to users of your site in Google search results.

If you own a blog, forum, membership page of a public profile, you may be subject to manual actions for user-generated spam based on the behavior of visitors and members of your website. Websites that permit user-generated content such as forums, blogs, and comments may receive manual actions if users bombard the site with self-promotional text links to unrelated or spam sites. Such users may cause spam to your content by malicious links that they add to their username or comments, in accordance with Google guidelines.

Google recognizes pages on your site that use spam techniques. Google detects spam on your pages sent by site visitors. This type of spam can happen in forums or blog pages where users are allowed to leave comments and links.

Some sites do a sneaky redirect where your site shows the user a page different from what Google actually displays, and redirects the user to the other page that Google sees. So this is a big violation and websites with such implementation will be removed from ranking or removed completely for continuous violation.

Websites that have nothing to do with your niche - Google gives great importance to relevance. You may want to search for links that have nothing to do with your website, especially if the links that Google has identified as unnatural outbound links. If you see unnatural links in the manual action page of your search console, this means that Google has found a pattern of unnatural, artificial, misleading, or manipulative links that refer to your website and that you should correct the problem.

If you receive pure spam penalties, your page will be removed from Google's index. When you receive traffic from platforms such as Google News, your page is automatically removed from the news index if it violates. The next day, Google will impose a penalty and not to rank for keyword or company name until it is resolved.

Google's penalties are measures that Google takes into consideration for website search ranking. These terms and conditions apply to penalties imposed on websites that violate Google's policies, which include removing all or part of the content from websites from Google's index. Actions on websites that violate Google policies can result in various penalties.

List of Google Manual Action

• Using third-party spam content to abuse the site
• User-generated spam
• manipulated Structured data issue
• Unnatural Links To or From your site
• Thin content with no value for users
• Cloaking
• Pure spam
• Cloaked images
• Hidden text in the pages
• keyword stuffing
• AMP content mismatch
• Sneaky mobile redirects
• News and Discover policy violations

How to Fix Manual Actions?

In order to fix manual actions and improve the quality of search results, Google scans websites if its policies and guidelines are not followed then it triggers the manual penalties. SEO site owners can use manual actions to report to the search console, and they will check the site with Google Search and a penalty will be issued to the site for any violation.

Once you have identified, you will see the type and short description of manual action. Now click the "Learn More" for more detailed information and figure out how to fix it. Don't fix only a few issues, check it out clearly and fix all the affected pages. 

If you have blocked the pages either by using robots.txt or no-index meta tags, or by OTP authorization, the Googlebot cannot crawl the pages and issues may be unsolved. So use the URL inspection tool, to check the pages can be crawled and indexed properly.

You need to do check the duplicate content issue, keyword manipulation, spammy links, manipulating reviews, manipulation site structure for users and search separately, and all the factors affecting manual action. The first thing you need to monitor and remove all the issues from site structure to the bad links. Make sure that every page on your site complies with the guidelines of Google's webmaster.

Next, if all the issues listed are fixed and working properly. Consider a "Request Review" In your reconsideration request, and describe your fixes clearly with explanations, proper steps you have taken, and the expected positive outcome of the actions taken. One thing you need to keep in mind is that Reconsideration reviews can take from several days to weeks depending upon the manual action issues or it can take more than the required time. So be patience and will be informed by mail about the process and make the page to rank without any issues. Make sure you don't resubmit multiple times until it is asked to resubmit for further progress.