Manual action recovery

Google News and Discover Policy Violations - Manual Action Recovery

Google has decided that content on your site breaks its News or Discover content policies, so we identify what triggered it, fix the content and the editorial processes behind it and prepare the evidence Google asks publishers to provide.

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Manual actions

News and Discover policy violations

WHAT IS A NEWS AND DISCOVER MANUAL ACTION?

Publishers are subject to an extra set of content policies on top of the spam policies, and when a reviewer decides your site has broken one of them you receive a manual action that names the specific policy involved. The list is a long one and includes transparency, misleading content, medical content, manipulated media, dangerous content, harassing content, hateful content, sexually explicit content, violence and gore, vulgar language and several deceptive practices covering impersonation and misrepresenting ownership, affiliation or location.

WHAT DOES IT DO TO YOUR SITE?

For a publisher that gets a large share of its traffic from Discover and Google News, this manual action can take away most of the audience in one go, and because Discover traffic arrives in big unpredictable spikes it's often the loss of those spikes that the commercial team notices first.

Scope: News and Discover surfaces
Typical clean-up time: Estimated after diagnosis
Review time: Several days or weeks

WHY DID GOOGLE ISSUE IT?

Articles are published without clear dates and bylines, or the site has no real information about its authors, its publisher, its editorial team and how to contact them, which is the transparency policy

Headlines and preview images promise details that the article doesn't deliver, which Google classes as misleading content

Health content has been published that contradicts scientific or medical consensus

The site conceals or misrepresents who owns it, where it's based or its relationships with governments or political interest groups

Individual articles contain material that falls under the dangerous, harassing, hateful, explicit, violent or vulgar content policies

HOW DO WE FIX IT?

We identify which policy is named in the notice and audit the site's content and its about, author and contact information against it
Policy and transparency audit
Evidence log · News and Discover policy violations
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We find every article that falls under the violation and agree with your editors whether each one is corrected, rewritten or removed
Article-level decisions
Evidence log · News and Discover policy violations
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We fix the transparency elements at template level, i.e. dates, bylines, author pages, publisher details, editorial policies and contact information
Byline and ownership checks
Evidence log · News and Discover policy violations
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We help you put the editorial changes in place that Google asks to see, including written editorial policies and clear editorial responsibility
Editorial safeguards
Evidence log · News and Discover policy violations
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We write the reconsideration request and compile the supporting evidence
Submission record
Evidence log · News and Discover policy violations
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date

WHAT GOES INTO THE RECONSIDERATION REQUEST?

These requests are different to every other manual action because Google asks publishers to provide evidence of changed editorial practices, including new editorial policies and an editorial board with a history of improved practices. So the request needs to show that the organisation has changed how it works, with the policy documents and the examples to prove it, and removing the offending articles on its own is unlikely to be enough.

Reconsideration request service →

Questions about recovery

Does this affect my normal search rankings?

These manual actions relate to Google's News and Discover policies, and we confirm the exact scope from your notice and your traffic data during the diagnostic so you know which surfaces are affected.

We're a small publisher without an editorial board, what do we do?

You need to be able to show who is responsible for editorial standards and what those standards are, and for a small team that can be a named editor and a published editorial policy.

How long does recovery take?

Your diagnostic will include a clean-up estimate, and Google’s review usually takes several days or weeks, with link reviews sometimes taking longer.

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