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…
AlgorithmsWebmaster spam policies
Google spam policies
Google's documented list of behaviours that can cause lower rankings or removal, covering cloaking, doorways, hacked content, keyword stuffing, link spam, scraped content and more.
In full
The policies define each violation and are the reference used both by automated systems and by the manual review team. They were expanded in March 2024 with scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse and site reputation abuse. Violations may be handled algorithmically, by manual action reported in Search Console, or both; reconsideration is only possible for manual actions.
Example
A site issues its writers a checklist mapped directly to each policy section before publication.
Related terms
Spam updates
Announced improvements to Google's automated spam detection, distinct from core updates, targeting violations of the spam policies.
Cloaking
Presenting different content or URLs to search engines than to users with the intent to manipulate rankings; a Google spam policy violation.
Scaled content abuse
Generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help users, whether by AI, templates, scraping, or stitching content…
Site reputation abuse
Publishing third-party content on a host site to exploit that site's ranking signals; a Google spam policy violation regardless of…