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A manual action is Google’s version of a person actually looking at your website and going, “Nope.” Not an algorithm shrugging. A human reviewer. And according to a few people who clean these up for a living, Google has been handing out more of them lately.
If your business blog has 300 posts and you’ve personally read maybe four of them, keep reading.
The short version
People who fix penalties for a living say they’re getting a lot more calls. On October 8, Search Engine Roundtable rounded up the chatter: Marie Haynes, who does manual action recovery work, said her requests went from essentially none to several per week. The types she’s seeing are thin content, pure spam and scaled content abuse.
The part that got my attention: she said most of these are long-standing, legitimate businesses. Not some guy in a basement running 900 casino sites. Regular companies.
The Google help forums tell the same story. A lot of the recent threads mention “Scaled Content Abuse” or “Thin content,” and a lot of them point at the /blog/ section. Google hasn’t said anything official about a spike, so I’m not going to pretend there’s a number. But when the people who mop up the mess say the floor is wetter than usual, I believe them.
A manual action means a human at Google reviewed your site and decided some of it breaks the spam rules, so part or all of it gets pulled from search. That’s it. No mystery.
The difference from an algorithm update matters. When an update knocks you down, you’re just ranking worse and nobody tells you why. With a manual action, Google actually tells you, in writing, in Search Console. It’s the only time Google sends you a note saying exactly what you did. Kind of polite, honestly. Like a cop who writes the ticket and also explains the speed limit.
Google’s own Manual actions report help page says the affected pages show up as URL patterns, and they can cover a slice of the site or the whole damn thing.
Because somebody told them they needed to “post consistently” and then handed the job to a robot with no supervision.
I see this all the time. A business owner signs up for some content package, or turns on an AI plugin, and a year later the blog has hundreds of posts called things like “10 Benefits of Plumbing in 2025” and “Why Choosing the Right Plumber Matters.” Nobody reads them. Nobody edits them. They all say the same nothing in a slightly different order.
That’s the textbook definition of scaled content. Google doesn’t care that a machine wrote it. It cares that it was pumped out in bulk to grab searches without helping anybody. I wrote about that line when Google updated its AI content guidelines, and it’s the same idea here: the robot still needs an editor, and the editor needs to be a person who knows the business.
(The other classic is the 40 near-identical “Plumber in [City Name]” pages. I already ranted about those in my spam update post, so I’ll spare you.)
Log in to Google Search Console, open Security & Manual Actions, and click Manual actions. If it says “No issues detected,” you’re fine. Go have lunch.
If you don’t have Search Console set up at all, that’s the real problem. It’s free, it’s Google talking directly to you, and a shocking number of small business sites have never connected it. You’re basically ignoring the one guy at the DMV who’s trying to help.
A few things worth checking even if you’re clean:
Fix every affected page, not just the worst ones, then hit Request Review in the report and explain exactly what you changed. Google’s help page is clear that a partial fix doesn’t get you a partial pass.
In practice that usually means deleting a lot of content. Not rewriting 300 posts with a different robot (that’s how you end up back in the same chair). Cut the fluff, keep the handful of posts that actually answer real customer questions, and make those really good. Then write the reconsideration request like a grown-up: what the problem was, what you removed, what you’re doing differently.
And be patient. Google says most reviews take several days or weeks. Don’t resubmit while one is pending. Spamming the spam team is not the move.
No. The problem is mass-produced, low-value pages, no matter who or what wrote them. An AI draft that a real person edited, fact-checked and filled with actual experience is fine.
The review itself usually takes days to weeks once you submit. Getting traffic back can take longer, and it only starts after Google accepts the fix.
No. A spam update is automated and Google doesn’t notify you. A manual action is a human decision, and you’ll see it in the Manual actions report in Search Console.
Here’s the unglamorous truth: a small business blog doesn’t need 300 posts. It needs maybe 15 that answer the questions your customers actually ask you on the phone, written by somebody who knows the answer. Fewer posts, better posts, and a real person’s name on them. That’s a lot less of a pain in the ass than a reconsideration request.
If you’re not sure what’s lurking in your blog folder, I’ll take a look and tell you straight what to keep and what to cut. Start here: tell me about your site, or see what I do on the services page.
