Manual action

A penalty applied by a person at Google after reviewing a site against the spam policies, reported in Search Console.

When a human reviewer finds a policy violation, Google can demote or remove affected pages or the whole site. The site owner is told in the Manual actions report in Search Console, which describes the issue.

After fixing it, the owner files a reconsideration request. This is different from an algorithmic demotion, which carries no notification and no request process.