Google publishes new manual actions aimed at Google News and Discover penalties

Google has quietly published a whole new set of manual actions around Google News and Google Discover policies and guidelines. Manual actions are when Google human reviewers apply a penalty to a website or webpages after it has come to Google’s attention that something was done that was not in accordance with Google’s posted webmaster guidelines.

Previously, Google only had manual actions for Google web search related guidelines. Now, Google has added manual actions around Google News and Google Discover.

The new manual actions. Here are the new manual actions listed in the manual actions help document for Google News and Google Discover:

• Discover policy violation: Adult-themed content
• News and Discover policy violation: Dangerous content
• News and Discover policy violation: Harassing content
• News and Discover policy violation: Hateful content
• News and Discover policy violation: Manipulated media
• News and Discover policy violation: Medical content
• Discover policy violation: Misleading content
• News and Discover policy violation: Sexually explicit content
• News and Discover policy violation: Terrorist content
• News policy violation: Transparency
• News and Discover policy violation: Violence and gore content
• News and Discover policy violation: Vulgar language and profanity

Links to these new manual actions were added to both the Google News content policies section and the Google Discover content policies section.

Why we care. If you are in the publishing space, you will want to ensure that you understand these specific manual actions. All these manual actions do are enforce the existing policies and guidelines Google has already published within its help documents. But now, it is possible, that your website or web pages can receive a manual action through Google Search Console for violating any of these listed guidelines above.

To read through the specifics of each guideline, see the full list on Google.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.