Why Google Manual Actions happen (and why rarely at a surprise)?
How Manual Actions actually emerge and how organizations recover
- Bohdan Lytvyn
- August 04, 2026
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What is Google Penalty, e.g. Manual Action, in an organizational sense?
A Manual Action is Google's demand that an organization give up enough of the practices that violate its quality expectations. It forces a business to renegotiate the balance between commercial optimization, including SEO, and demonstrable user value. The most common types of manual actions are: Link Schemes, “Thin” content or, recently, Site Reputation Abuse.
Why didn’t we know we’re at risk of penalties?
Manual Actions are rarely complete surprises. In many cases, organizations knowingly or unknowingly operate close to Google's quality boundaries for quite a while. So, the penalty simply formalizes what had previously been accepted as operational risk. In the extreme, paradoxical as it may be seen, most managers actually knew (or should have known) that they are at risk of receiving these sanctions. Yet, apparently, there can be exclusions, including when
- Some genuinely don't.
- Many inherit the site.
- Many agencies created it.
- Many managers never questioned it.
What produces Manual Actions?
If restated, the question asks “Which business process keeps producing thin pages?” This shifts an emphasis from understanding, for example, what pages are “thin” to the problem of proper governance.
In finding the root causes of a penalty, distinction shall be made between symptoms and causes themselves.
Symptoms are, for example:
- repetitive templates
- AI-generated pages at scale
- copied comparisons
- doorway pages, massive use of paid (acquired vs earned) links and other link building scheme
- affiliate-heavy layouts
- Site reputation abuse with a sole purpose to rank certain, for example, gambling pages.
Root causes:
- wrong incentive systems
- (inadequate) publishing governance
- SEO KPIs
- affiliate monetization
- content production economics
A symptom is how the problem shows itself or a manifestation whereas a cause of the problem is what business consideration engendered it.
For example, the common causes of “thin” content pages are:
- Content production economics that is geared towards the metrics of the number of indexed URLs.
- Little or no quality assurance and publishing guidance that lets shallow pages published.
- Incentive system based on number of published URLs and the number of organic traffic.
How should Google penalties be interpreted?
To interpret the Google penalties you need to build a causal chain — draw a proper line of attribution of the infringing manifestations on the site to the business model itself. A propose the following visual form of it.
Business model
Operating incentives
Business practices
Site pattern
Interpretation of pattern by Google
Manual Action
Apparently, to interpret the Google penalties one shall make a regression of this process, i.e. go in the opposite direction, from Manual Action, e.g. backlinks, “thin” content or site reputation abuse, to the patterns of its manifestation on the site and onto established business practice and, finally, the very business model organization uses.
Let’s take an example of the Manual action of “Thin content with little or no added value”.
This manual action (message) states: “Thin content with little or no added value. This site appears to contain a significant percentage of low-quality or shallow pages that do not provide users with much added value (such as thin affiliate pages, cookie-cutter sites, doorway pages, or copied content). Impact: Affects all pages on the website.”
Interpretation often starts from site pattern’s guessing — e.g. “Is it because we use AI for translation?”, which means skipping the part of how site’s patterns are being interpreted by Google. Yet, a proper starting point is espousing a “double interpretation” approach: “how to interpret what Google has interpreted we do?” This is to say, what are our hypotheses why Google interpreted our work as a “cookie-cutter” site? One way to go about this is, because, possibly, we are pretty much keywords-driven, which makes our page structure predictable and content unnatural? It’s only from this position of a plausible interpretation that we can start looking for patterns that support or refute the hypothesis.
How to get recovered from the Manual Action penalty?
Determine the minimum set of structural changes required to convince Google that the underlying behaviour has changed. To determine this, I use a “sausage slicing” rule, which can also be (more neutrally) called controlled reduction strategy.
It tells the following: rather than dismantling the entire business model immediately, recovery should proceed through carefully planned batches of changes, each sufficient to test whether Google's concerns have been adequately addressed while preserving as much legitimate business value as possible.
Recovery should remove the minimum amount of business capability necessary while fully addressing the underlying quality concerns.
What is the roadmap to recovery from Google penalties?
I suggest a recovery framework that consists of 7 steps.
1. Root Cause Attribution
Identify which business processes produced the violations.
2. Structural Diagnosis
Determine how deeply those processes are embedded in the organization’s business model and behavior.
3. Commercial Impact Assessment
Estimate the operational cost of removing or redesigning them. Simply saying, diagnose how deep is this within the business model, how painful it is to give up (in most cases, it is painful)?
4. Progressive Recovery Planning
Define implementation batches with clear validation points: minimum, optimum and maximal.
5. Governance Measures
Create metrics and decision rules preventing recurrence of the Manual actions (penalties).
6. Reconsideration, a proof of work
Prepare evidence demonstrating meaningful change on the site as regards what has been the matter of penalty.
7. Iterative Recovery
If required, continue with additional recovery batches until the Manual Action is lifted.
Why did we receive a Manual Action now?
One client actually asked me:
If our business model has been operational for 17 years already, why are we getting this manual action right now?
Organizations often assume that because a practice worked for many years, it must be acceptable. In reality, Google's interpretation of quality is moving. What ranked successfully in 2015 may become a liability in 2026. Not necessarily because the site changed dramatically, but because Google's understanding of what constitutes genuine user value has changed.
This makes a recovery from Manual Action itself a moving target.
In many recovery projects, traffic deterioration begins long before the Manual Action itself. The Manual Action is often the final step in a much longer decline rather than the beginning of the problem.
Will Google tell us what still needs fixing after the reconsideration request?
Google intentionally does not operate as a recovery consultant.
If Google identified every remaining issue after each reconsideration request, recovery would become an iterative optimization exercise where organizations gradually learned the minimum required to regain rankings while preserving the same underlying practices. Whereas, in practice, the purpose of reconsideration is to demonstrate that the organization itself understands the underlying problem.
Has your website received a manual action from Google?
Then, I guess, you need help making sense of the event itself: why what seemed to work for years suddenly stopped working, whether the damage is reversible, and whether Google will guide you?
If you want to discuss your case, let's chat.
About the author
SEO/GEO consultant with 17 years experience in Organic Acquisition and Findability.
Bohdan Lytvyn
"WASTELESS GROWTH" BOOK AUTHOR
Organic Search Capabilities
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Keyword research to reduce acquisition risk, identify real client motivations, and design organic funnels based on how customers actually search.
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I analyze how competitors design their content and SEO systems to satisfy the same client demand, identifying value creation patterns and structural waste.
