How Google Manual Penalty affect your website?
Google’s mission is to help bring to users Good quality content that follows Guidelines rules. In order to make it so, people working for Google are reviewing page content to determine if it complies with the Guidelines or violates them.
Unlike an algorithmic penalty, a manual penalty is set by a human who reviewed your pages and content and considered it did not comply with Google webmaster Guidelines. Spam content, Keyword stuffing. Penalties can be very different
Traditional manual penalties result in a ranking drop or traffic drop. For google News ad Google Discover the new set of penalties is still unclear
The best to see it is to look at your Google Search Console, if you see a traffic drop then it might be due to a manual penalty
Manual Action Affect
- an entire website
- a specific url or section of the website
Reasons of the Penalty
- Spammy content
- Third-party spam that affect your website
- unnatural links to your website
- spammy links
- cloaked images
- cloaked content
- hidden text
- keyword stuffing
Every time Google Update or launch a new core update or spam filter, if your website has one of those listed reasons, he can be victim of a manual penalty
What to Check?
First check your backlink and Anchor Text. Cause of the penalty can be associated with Over-optimized anchor text that match exactly your keywords. Or it can be that the backlink is a spam, bad content
Usually over-optimized anchor text comes from a poor quality website
It might be also that you have been hack and someone is adding new spammy pages and index them fast that is affecting your website. Using Search Console or Screaming frog you can find those spammy pages and fix them