Google has unleashed tons of manual actions, search ranking penalties you can see within Google Search Console, after it released its search spam policy updates on Tuesday. The manual actions seemed to mostly have been distributed yesterday, Wednesday, March 6th, a day after Google announced the new spam policy changes.
As a reminder, Google has three new/changed search spam policies; content and expired domain abuse that began enforcement yesterday and the site reputation abuse policy that begins enforcement in May 2024. I go into those policy updated in detail over here.
Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google’s spam policies. Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate the Google search index. Most issues reported here will result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual indication to the user, Google said.
Google has been busy issues manual actions to these sites it believes are in violation of these two new policies and other spam policy violations. In fact, many SEOs and site owners are saying their sites are no longer showing in the Google Search index, even for a site command, after receiving the manual actions.
Just to be clear, those impacted by the March 2024 core update will not receive manual actions. Algorithmic updates do not lead to notifications in Search Console, no matter how badly we all want an automated action viewer in Search Console. It is also possible to be hit by a manual action and also an algorithmic penalty (Google does not like to call them penalties).
I received a number of these reports on X and also in the comments area here. Glenn Gabe summed it up with this GIF:
Google’s manual actions team last night. pic.twitter.com/9zCLYXmURd
β Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 6, 2024
Here are those complaints or mentions of this happening:
