What are manual actions and how do I fix them?

A manual action means a person at Google reviewed your site and found pages that break Google's spam policies. Until it is lifted, some or all of the site can rank lower or drop out of results. Google tells you in the Manual actions report and in Search Console's messages. To fix one, correct the problem on every affected page, then click Request Review and explain what you changed. Reviews usually take days to weeks.

The manual actions Google lists

Google's Manual actions help currently names these types:

• Back button hijacking (a spam policy introduced in April 2026)
• Site abused with third-party spam, and user-generated spam
• Spammy free host
• Structured data issue
• Unnatural links to your site, and unnatural links from your site
• Thin content with little or no added value
• Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects, cloaked images, and sneaky mobile redirects
• Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
• Major spam problems
• AMP content mismatch
• News and Discover policy violations
• Site reputation policy

Each entry in the report says what was found and which part of the site it covers. That can be one section or the whole site, and a listed URL pattern doesn't mean every matching page is affected.

Fixing it and asking for a review

1. Read the description and the example URLs, then the Google policy the action links to.
2. Fix the problem everywhere it occurs. Google is explicit that cleaning up only some pages earns no partial return to results.
3. Make sure Google can reach the corrected pages: no login, paywall, robots.txt block or noindex in the way.
4. Click Request Review. Explain the exact issue, what you did about it and the result, with evidence such as the links you had removed or the content you rewrote.
5. Wait for Google's answer, and don't send another request while one is pending. Google says most reviews take several days or weeks, and link-related ones can take longer.

For an unnatural links action, removing the links you control and disavowing the rest is usually part of the fix (disavowing links).

Is it really a manual action?

• The report is empty, but traffic fell. Then it isn't a manual action. The report only lists actions taken by human reviewers, so algorithmic changes such as core updates don't appear in it, and neither do technical problems like an accidental noindex tag.
• Visitors see browser warnings. That is a security issue, such as hacking or malware, handled in a separate report: see the Security Issues report.
• The Overview page. It summarises manual actions and security issues for the property, so a quick look there each month catches both.

How AutoPSEO helps

AutoPSEO marks Google's confirmed core and spam updates on its charts as annotations, so you can see whether a fall lines up with an update or with the date a manual action arrived. Its alerts post to Slack, Microsoft Teams or a webhook when clicks drop past a threshold or a day's traffic is an outlier, so a penalty is noticed within days rather than at the next monthly review.