Spam policies, manual actions and penalties

Ranking badly and being penalised feel identical from the outside and are completely different underneath. Confusing them wastes months.

Two mechanisms

Algorithmic suppression. Systems judge content low quality or spammy and rank it lower. No notification, nothing in Search Console. Resolved by fixing the underlying problem and waiting for re-assessment.

Manual action. A human reviewer at Google looked at your site and applied a penalty. It appears in Search Console's Manual actions report, with a reason. Resolved by fixing the issue and submitting a reconsideration request — a real review by a real person.

If the Manual actions report is empty, you do not have a penalty. Whatever is wrong is algorithmic or technical.

The policies worth knowing

Google's spam policies name specific practices. The ones that catch legitimate businesses by accident:

• Site reputation abuse ("parasite SEO") — third-party content published on a trusted site to exploit that site's reputation. Coupon sections, sponsored subfolders, rented subdomains.
• Scaled content abuse — generating many pages primarily to game search rather than help people. Explicitly not about whether AI was used, but about intent and value.
• Expired domain abuse — buying a domain for its residual authority and repurposing it.
• Link schemes — buying or exchanging links that pass signals.
• Cloaking — showing different content to crawlers and users.

Enforcement is not uniform any more

August 2026 delivered an important precedent: under European Commission mandate, from 30 August Google stopped applying site reputation abuse manual actions to search results inside the EEA. Outside it, nothing changed. The manual action still appears in Search Console, and the affected section is instead separated in Google's systems so it ranks independently of the parent domain over time.

The immediate consequence is practical — one page can rank in Berlin and be absent in Boston, so EEA SERPs no longer match US ones. The larger point is that platform policy enforcement can now be partitioned by region under regulatory pressure, and that is likely to recur.

What trips people up

• Assuming a drop is a penalty. Check the report first; it takes ten seconds.
• Submitting reconsideration without fixing anything. It fails and burns time.
• Assuming your market's SERP is everyone's.

You have got this when

You check Manual actions before theorising, and you can explain the difference between "we were penalised" and "we were outranked" to someone who thinks they are the same.