What is Manual Action?
A human reviewer penalty suppressing a site or pages until fixed and reconsidered. Check the Search Console report first whenever traffic collapses overnight without an update correlation.
Related terms
Reconsideration Request
The documented cleanup plea after fixing a manual action: what was wrong, what changed, and evidence. Granted on proof of remediation, not on promises.
Link Spam
Manipulative linking at scale: paid posts without disclosure, PBNs, injections, automated comments. Detection (SpamBrain and manual review) targets patterns, so one tactic’s death never saves the strategy.
Site Reputation Abuse
Publishing third-party content (coupons, payday loans, unrelated affiliates) to exploit a reputable domain’s rankings. A policy violation regardless of disclosure quality.
Off-Page SEO
Everything that builds a site’s reputation elsewhere: backlinks, mentions, reviews, and digital PR. Off-page signals validate what on-page content claims about expertise.
Referring Domain
A unique site linking to you. Domain diversity matters more than raw link counts: 100 links from one site look like one relationship, not 100 votes.
Link Equity
The ranking value passed through a link, shaped by the source’s authority, relevance, and number of outbound links. Internal links distribute equity; external links earn it.