A Google penalty is a manual action: a human reviewer has examined part of a site, decided that it breaks the spam policies, and lowered its rankings or removed it from search results.
There is only one place to check: the Manual actions report in Google Search Console. If it shows the green tick, the drop you are looking at has another cause, and the reconsideration request you are about to write will not be read by anyone.
The check that comes before all the others
In Search Console the path is Security & Manual Actions, then Manual actions. At the top of the report is the number of open actions on the site. If there are none, Google shows a message and a green tick.
If there is an action, expanding the description shows the pattern of affected pages. It may be a directory, for example https://example.com/real-estate/*, or the label "All pages affected", which means the whole site. Not every page matching the pattern is necessarily affected, but that is the scope.
The second check, which tells you whether the site has been removed from the index, is a search with the site: operator on the domain. Zero results for a site that used to have some is serious information. A traffic drop with neither of these two signs should be treated as a traffic drop, with the diagnosis that applies in those cases.
A manual action and an algorithmic drop are not fixed the same way
| Manual action | Drop after an update | |
|---|---|---|
| Who decides | A reviewer from Google's spam team | The ranking systems, with no human involved |
| Notification | Yes, in the Manual actions report and the Messages panel | No, no individual communication |
| Cause | A confirmed breach of the spam policies | A reassessment of quality relative to competitors |
| Scope | Stated in the report: directory, section or whole site | Can only be reconstructed by segmenting queries and pages |
| Way out | A complete fix and a reconsideration request | Work on the content, no procedure to trigger |
| Time to outcome | Several days to several weeks after the request | Tied to the systems reprocessing the site, no guarantee |
Google does not use the word penalty in its documentation. It uses manual action for human intervention, and for everything else it talks about automated systems and ranking updates. This is not a matter of wording: a core update can't be fixed, because there is nothing to fix. The site has not broken a rule, it has been rated lower than before compared with the sites around it.
What triggers a manual action
The reference list is the spam policies, last updated on 28 August 2026. You know the long-standing entries: keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text and links, sneaky redirects, thin content, affiliate pages with no added value, user-generated spam, hacked sites, and link spam, both inbound and outbound.
On 5 March 2024 Google added three more, and many guides still haven't caught up: expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse. For the last one Google gave two months' notice, with enforcement starting on 5 May 2024.
The scaled content policy is the one that affects more sites than realise it. It doesn't look at how content was produced: it looks at how many pages without value exist. Google said so explicitly when it announced it: the policy applies "whether content is produced through automation, human efforts, or some combination of human and automated processes". Whoever generates three hundred pages of location variants with a language model and whoever pays writers by the piece to produce them ends up in the same box, and the issue is the result, not the tool: we have a separate page on AI-generated content.
Manual actions are still what is left over. Google's automated systems detect 40 billion spam pages a day, according to the How Search Works page. The human team steps in on what the algorithms don't close on their own.
From 30 August 2026 site reputation works differently in the EEA, but not in the UK
On 28 August 2026 the Search Quality team published an update to the site reputation policy, written after discussions with the European Commission. From 30 August a manual action applied under that policy has different effects depending on where the searcher is. The dividing line is the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway), and the UK is outside it.
| Outside the European Economic Area, UK included | Inside the EEA | |
|---|---|---|
| Effect of the manual action | Applies directly to the affected part of the site | Does not apply |
| Treatment of the section | The rest of the site is left out of the action | Can be separated from the main domain and rank on its own |
| Actions already in place | Remain | Google has revoked them |
| Notification in Search Console | Yes | Yes |
| Ways to challenge it | Reconsideration request | Reconsideration with a faster response and fuller reasons, plus free mediation |
Mediation goes through the Google Search Mediation Scheme, run by CEDR in London. It is free, but only for business users based in the EEA: a UK business can't use it, even though the mediator is in London.
For a UK publisher the practical effect is split. In UK results nothing changes: a coupon section, or a product comparison section run by a partner, can still drop out of search because of a manual action. In results shown to users in the EEA, the same section is treated as a separate block that over time ranks on its own merits rather than on those of the main site. Google also states that having been separated is not used as a ranking signal, and that a page affected in the past in the EEA is not left at a disadvantage.
In the same post Google says it remains concerned that an overly broad application of the Digital Markets Act will stop it from tackling real threats to the integrity of its results. The policy stays in force, only what happens when it is triggered changes.
The reconsideration request and the three things it must contain
You send it from the Manual actions report, with the Request review button, and only after fixing the problem. Google sets three requirements for a valid request: explain the quality issue precisely, describe the steps taken to fix it, and document the outcome of those steps. A request that promises to do better in future without saying what has been done meets none of the three.
Three details that make requests fail even when the work has been done properly.
- Fixing some of the affected pages does not lead to partial reinstatement. Either all of them are fixed or the action stays.
- The affected pages must be reachable by Google during the review: no login, paywall, robots.txt block or noindex. Check with the URL Inspection tool.
- If the site has more than one open manual action, they all need resolving, otherwise nothing changes.
On timing, Google says most reviews take from several days to a few weeks, and that link-related requests can take longer. A confirmation email arrives first, which is not an outcome. Sending a second request while the first is in the queue speeds nothing up.
The case where fixing things brings nothing back
There is a line in the spam updates documentation worth reading before you sign a recovery quote. When Google's systems remove the effect of spam links, the ranking benefit those links generated is lost: Google writes that it "cannot be regained". Removing or disavowing the links puts the site back in line with the rules, it doesn't give the positions back, because those positions were built on something that no longer counts.
Even where recovery is possible, the same page warns that changes help if the automated systems learn "over a period of months" that the site complies. Not weeks. That is why a credible recovery plan starts from the fix and not from a return date, and why in our SEO projects the first thing we look at on a site that has lost traffic is the Manual actions report, not the graph.
One last thing that is rarely said. The word penalty sells: there are penalty removal services offered to sites that have no open manual action. The check that disproves them is in Search Console and takes less than a minute. Before buying a recovery, ask whoever is selling it to show you that report. If it is green, what you are buying is content quality work: legitimate, often useful, but it goes by another name and is measured with other numbers.
Frequently asked questions about Google penalties
No. A core update changes how Google assesses the relative quality of results and does not imply any breach of the policies. No notification arrives in Search Console and there is no reconsideration request to send.
Google does not publish a duration. In the official documentation the action stays until the problem has been fixed on all affected pages and the reconsideration request has been accepted.
No, and it achieves nothing. Reconsideration exists only for manual actions and for security issues flagged in Search Console. If the report is green, the traffic drop has another cause and should be diagnosed as such.
Only for manual actions: the notice appears in the Manual actions report and in the Search Console Messages panel. Demotions decided by the automated systems are not communicated to the site owner.
Search for site: followed by the domain. Zero results for a site that used to have some means the pages are no longer in the index. The Manual actions report then tells you whether a human intervention is involved.
