SEOs report more manual actions as Google stays silent

Two SEO consultants say they are seeing more Google manual actions. Barry Schwartz reported it at Search Engine Roundtable on 8 October 2026, after Marie Haynes posted about it on X on 7 October. This is a report of anecdotes. Google has published no figures and no statement.

What are SEOs reporting?#

Haynes wrote that she has “had a big increase in requests for help with manual actions lately”. She listed the types as “thin content, pure spam, and scaled content”, and added that most of the sites are “legitimate long standing businesses”.

Asked by Schwartz how big the change is, she said it “went from essentially no requests to several per week”. She called that “not nearly as high as the pre-Penguin manual action era”, and noted that she no longer advertises manual action consulting.

Daniel Foley Carter posted on the same day that he has seen manual actions “popping up” more over the last few months. His reading of the cause, that shortcuts and scaled content abuse are catching up with the industry, is his opinion, not something Google has said.

Is there any data behind it?#

Not from Google. Schwartz went through the Google Search Central help forum himself and picked out a dozen recent manual action threads, among them thin content, major spam problems and rejected reconsideration requests. He asked ChatGPT and Gemini whether complaints had spiked. Per his account, both said there are more, but not a very big spike, and their charts differed.

He also says the rise seems to have started several weeks ago and picked up more recently, “according to some SEOs”. Forum threads and a consultant’s inbox are not a count of manual actions issued, so the size of any change is unknown.

Manual action or spam update?#

Google’s Search Console Help says a manual action is issued when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site do not comply with its spam policies. It says algorithms detect most spam automatically, and manual action is the added step to protect the index. Affected pages or sites can be ranked lower or left out of results.

A spam update is the algorithmic route. Google’s September 2026 spam update began on 24 September and finished on 8 October, the same day as these reports. Nothing in the sources links the two, and the timing alone does not show a connection. For the background on how Google frames spam updates and scaled content, see Google ties more spam updates to a flood of new content.

Where does Search Console show it?#

Google says an affected site is notified in the Manual actions report and in the Search Console message center. The report shows a count of actions at the top, or a green check mark when there are none, plus the affected page patterns. They can be a subset of the site or all pages. Open both places, since Search Console is where Google tells you.

How does reconsideration work?#

Google’s guidance is to fix the issue on all affected pages, since fixing only some earns no partial return. Then select Request Review and describe the problem, the steps taken and the outcome. The review can take several days or weeks, and Google asks site owners not to resubmit before a decision.

What is not known?#

How many manual actions Google is issuing, whether it changed anything about how it reviews sites, and whether the cases track the core updates and spam updates Google has shipped this year. Google has made no statement. Treat the reports as a reason to open the report for your own site, not as a measured trend.