Details on Google’s Manual Action Penalties
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August 21, 2018
Google has two methods of recognizing irrelevant sites to optimize a users search results. The two methods are automatic and manual actions. The automatic method is driven by an advanced algorithm that can identify potentially spammy or poorly developed sites. The manual method is just that, a real person manually reviewing content to determine if it is useful to internet users. If the site is found to be not useful or outside of Google’s webmaster quality guidelines, it may be penalized giving the site a lower PageRank.
Recently Google’s Senior Webmaster Trend Analyst, John Mueller, offered greater insight into the two different types of manual actions and understanding how to recover from the penalties. It is important to follow Google’s webmaster quality guidelines to ensure that you will receive a healthy PageRank which will maximize the visibility of your site within search.
Google’s Two Types of Manual Action Penalties
There are two types of manual actions, one more severe than the other.
- Complete removal of the site from search and indexing
- Partial removal from search
The first of the penalties is the harshest. If Google sees little value in investing resources to index content from a website, it will result in complete removal from the search results and indexing. This can happen because the site contains scraped or spun content, or is completely duplicative of another website. This kind of penalty results in a situation where the site does not exist at all for Google and nothing from that site will appear in search results.
The second is less severe and slightly easier to recover from as you are not completely kicked off of Google, however, you have no visibility through PageRank. In order to regain visibility, the site must edit or rewrite content before Google re-crawls the pages to ensure the issues have been resolved. After the page has been re-processed Google will continue to rank the page normally.
Regaining status after a manual penalty is not impossible but it can be extremely difficult. Both will have an effect on overall page rank and will require action taken by the webmaster to regain trust with Google. However, by understanding how Google filters and penalizes content we can avoid making mistakes that can lead to devastating penalties.