Manual Actions Went From Zero to Several a Week. Here’s the Pattern Behind Them.

For most of the last decade, manual actions were a museum piece. Google’s algorithms got good enough that the manual penalty queue stopped mattering, and consultants who once made a living clearing them moved on to other work. The whole subject felt like 2013.

Then in October, Marie Haynes — who spent two decades doing manual action consulting and no longer advertises it — said she had gone from essentially zero requests to several a week. Daniel Foley Carter reported the same uptick. And the reasons listed are the part worth reading carefully: thin content, pure spam, and scaled content.

Then the sentence that should stop anyone who has bought a cheap submission package: most of these sites are legitimate, long-standing businesses.

Why this is a bigger deal than a normal update

Algorithmic updates rerank pages. A manual action is a person or a classifier-backed review deciding that a specific site violated a specific policy, and it can remove a site from results entirely or neuter the parts it touches. Recovery is not a matter of waiting for the next rollout — it means fixing the problem, documenting the fix, and asking for reconsideration.

That is a completely different kind of problem, and it arrives with a completely different timeline. A site hit by a spam update can drift back over a quarter. A site under a manual action loses visibility now and stays that way until someone resolves it.

The composition of the complaints tells you what the reviewers are looking at. Not “too many links.” Thin content. Pure spam. Scaled content. In other words, the same category the September spam update targeted — and the same category a lot of link-building services quietly produce.

The pattern that gets a normal business flagged

Nobody running a real company decides to become a spam site. They buy a service that promises visibility, and the service produces the pattern for them. The most common version looks like this:

A description package. You send your product URL. The provider returns a list of 100+ directory submissions and confirms the listings went live. The descriptions are templated from your homepage meta description with light variation.

A content package. Twenty articles about your category, published on sites you’ve never heard of, all ending with the same call to action and the same two internal links.

A submission blast. Everything done in the same week, creating a spike in off-site mentions that has no analogue in the site’s own publishing history.

Each piece is unremarkable on its own. Together they produce exactly the fingerprint that “scaled content” describes: a volume of near-identical pages, published on unrelated domains, created in a batch, describing the same thing. If the classifier is built to find that shape, a legitimate business looks like the target.

What separates a business that stays clear

The fourth and fifth rows are the ones a template can never deliver, which is why they are also the ones worth paying for.

If you do get one

If a manual action appears in Search Console, the sequence matters more than the speed:

First, read the specific policy named. It is usually narrower than it feels, and it tells you which part of your site is the problem.

Second, look for the batch. Manual actions almost always trace back to something that arrived in volume — a submission blast, a content package, a site-wide template change. Find the batch and you have found the fix.

Third, fix the pattern rather than individual URLs one at a time. If 60 directory listings share a template, the fix is the policy and the descriptions, not deleting links by hand for a week.

Fourth, keep a written record of what changed and when. Reconsideration is a conversation, and a clear record is most of what you have to bring to it.

The uncomfortable conclusion

The shift toward manual enforcement is not really about spam in the abstract. It is about volume. Everything Google has said this year — 40 billion spam pages filtered daily, more spam updates because there is more new content, scaled content now a bigger problem than link spam — points at the same variable: how much of something appeared, how fast, and how similar it all looks.

Which means the safest thing a small business can do with its off-site presence is also the slowest: fewer placements, each one written by a person, spread out over months. That is a worse pitch than “100 directories in 7 days,” and it is the version that does not end up in a consultant’s inbox two years later.

The operational version of that advice is to stop buying volume and start placing things one at a time. https://backlinksubmit.org works that way: a product URL matched to relevant directories and communities from a handpicked list, submissions written manually rather than generated, a console showing which platforms have been submitted and how each is progressing, and no re-submission to platforms you already use.

FAQ

Are manual actions actually increasing, or is it seasonal noise?

The reported change is in consultant demand, not in a published Google statistic: from near-zero to several requests a week for someone who no longer advertises the service. Treat it as a directional signal that reviewers are more active, not as a precise measure.

Can a legitimate business get a manual action for buying directory submissions?

Yes, if the submissions are templated and delivered in bulk. The policy named is usually thin or scaled content rather than link spam, which is why the diagnosis surprises people.

Does a manual action always remove the site from search?

No. Some remove specific sections or treat specific patterns. But any manual action requires a resolution and a reconsideration request; it does not clear on its own with the next algorithm update.

What’s the fastest way to reduce the risk?

Stop buying volume. Replace any batch submission or bulk content package with a smaller number of placements written individually on platforms that have a review step — and space them out rather than shipping them in one week.