A 'manual-action' refers to a specific action a human must perform on a website or within a digital system, initiated outside of the normal, automated processes. It’s a response to perceived problems, often involving policy violations or negative user experiences that require direct intervention from a website administrator or search engine evaluator. This includes activities like removing content, imposing penalties, or refining the user experience through direct observation and adjustment, differing from automated procedures.
Manual-action meaning with examples
- A website experiencing a surge in spam comments may trigger a 'manual-action' where moderators review and delete these comments to maintain a positive user environment. This is critical to ensure genuine discussions, improve website engagement, and improve user trust.
- If a website is found to be engaging in deceptive link schemes, Google may impose a 'manual-action' penalty, requiring the website owner to disavow the problematic links and demonstrate that they are not actively violating the search engine's guidelines to recover traffic and rankings.
- Following a user complaint of inappropriate content, a platform administrator would likely initiate a 'manual-action' review, assess the situation, and determine if the content violates the website's terms of service, warranting removal or user account restrictions.
- During a website migration, if a redirect isn't working correctly, requiring users to navigate to the site's previous links, an administrator will have to go in and manually fix and check the status of the site, through a 'manual-action'.
- A small blog can be prone to spam links in its comments, leading to a 'manual-action' to regularly review, identify, and remove any problematic content to improve the website's SEO and prevent it from dropping in rankings, to improve search performance.