Manual action and deindexing: identifying it and requesting reconsideration

A manual action is when a human reviewer at Google looked at your site and specifically decided to demote or remove pages from it in search results for violating quality guidelines. This is different from an algorithmic drop, which has no human reviewer, shows up in no report, and has no possible reconsideration request.

This distinction resolves a good share of the anxiety that shows up in SEO forums: questions like "can I be penalized forever?" or "can a bunch of 404 links penalize my site?" almost always come from not having checked yet whether a manual action is actually on record.

The answer is in one single place, and it takes less than a minute to check.

Open Search Console for the affected property and go to the "Manual actions" report, in the security and manual actions menu. According to Google's official documentation, if there is no manual action against the site, the report explicitly shows a message confirming that: there is no ambiguity.

If there is a manual action, the report shows:

• The type of violation (the official list has more than 20 categories, from unnatural links to hacked content).
• Whether it affects the whole site or a specific set of URLs or URL patterns.
• A description of the problem and, in many cases, examples of affected pages.

Also check the "Security issues" report in the same section. It covers different cases (malware, hacked content, social engineering) and follows a similar notification and fix logic.

According to Ranktracker's glossary on manual action, the most frequent causes include:

• Unnatural links, either pointing to the site or going out from it, meant to manipulate ranking.
• Low value or shallow content, including content generated at scale without review.
• Excessive keyword use (keyword stuffing).
• Cloaking, when the content shown to Googlebot is different from what is shown to the user.
• Structured data spam (schema markup used to deceive rather than describe the actual content).
• User generated spam, in cases involving unmoderated forums, comments, or profile pages.

A recurring pattern in reports from SEO professionals is teams pressured to publish content at scale, generated by AI with no editorial review, to meet volume targets, only to find out afterward that this triggered a "scaled content abuse" violation. This specific topic has a dedicated article on spam updates and scaled content abuse.

1. Read the full description of the violation in the report, including the example URLs provided by Google. Do not assume you know the problem without reading the official text.
2. Fix every occurrence, not just the cited examples. If the violation is "unnatural links", this includes reviewing the entire backlink profile, not just the links mentioned in the report.
3. Document what was done: date of the fix, pages changed or removed, links disavowed (where applicable). This documentation goes into the reconsideration request.
4. Submit the reconsideration request through Search Console itself, on the same screen as the manual actions report. According to Google, this request is specifically to ask that the site be reassessed after the fix, not to dispute that the problem exists.
5. Wait for the review. The timeline is not fixed and can take from a few days to a few weeks, depending on request volume and case complexity.

In practice: the most common mistake I see in reconsideration requests is rushing it. Sending the request before fixing every occurrence (not just the ones cited as examples) usually results in rejection and resets the waiting clock.

If Google rejects the request, the report generally indicates whether the problem persists, even without detailing every individual URL. In that case, widen the audit: review the entire scope of the violation again, not just the points already fixed, and look for patterns you may have missed the first time around (a forgotten subdomain, a set of old pages outside the main CMS, a content partner still publishing in the same pattern).

Resubmitting a second request without substantial changes tends to get the same result. The time between attempts is worth more when it is used to genuinely widen the fix.

It is worth repeating, because the confusion is common: if the manual actions report is clean, the traffic drop has another origin: an algorithm update, a technical problem, or a combination of smaller factors. The playbook for these cases is in the diagnostic guide to Google traffic drops and, when nothing else explains the drop, in drop with no apparent cause.

Before any other investigation, it is worth opening the manual actions report and the security issues report in Search Console. If both are clean, manual penalty drops off the suspect list and the best path is My traffic dropped: a diagnostic guide to Google traffic drops. If something is listed, the sooner the fix starts getting documented, the better: the reconsideration request only joins the queue once it is ready.