Manual action
A demotion or removal applied by a human reviewer at Google for a spam policy violation, reported in Search Console with a reconsideration…
LinksLink schemes
Link spam
Google's spam policy category covering links intended to manipulate rankings: buying or selling links, excessive exchanges, automated link creation and low-quality directory or article links.
In full
The policy names buying links with money, goods or services; excessive reciprocal linking; large-scale article marketing and guest posting with keyword-rich anchors; automated link generation; and requiring links as terms of service or agreements. Enforcement takes two forms: algorithmic neutralisation, where the links simply stop counting, and manual actions reported in Search Console. Google's SpamBrain system is used to detect and nullify link spam at scale.
Example
A site is issued an 'Unnatural links to your site' manual action after buying 300 sidebar placements with exact-match anchors.
Related terms
SpamBrain
Google's AI-based spam prevention system, used to detect spam at crawl and ranking time and to identify and neutralise unnatural links.
Disavow links tool
A Search Console tool for asking Google to ignore specified inbound links or domains, intended for sites with a link-related manual action…
Private blog network
A set of websites, often built on expired domains, controlled by one party for the purpose of passing links to money sites; a clear link…
Guest posting
Writing articles for other publications; legitimate as an audience and authority tactic, but a link spam violation when done at scale…
Where to read more
- Another Step to Reward High-Quality Sites (Penguin) · Landmark Post · developers.google.com
- Spam Policies for Google Web Search · Guideline · developers.google.com