There is a difference between the manual penalties of Google and the kinds of automated penalties that your site receives from its algorithm. Updates to the algorithm of Google, such as the Panda update, can penalize your site for the low-quality content that it has got. And this can hurt your search engine ranking. But Google's manual penalties are not the same as that. This kind of penalty happens when you manually change some aspect to your site. And it is actually a human reviewer, hired by Google, who will check and then penalize your site based on whether or not it has breached the guidelines that are set out by Google.
If these website reviewers find out that your site is not adhering to the quality guidelines, then you will actually receive a manual action notice. This notice will explain to you what guidelines your site is not following, and what specific site pages need to be changed in order to follow those guidelines. Here are some of the things that could affect whether or not your site will get a manual site penalty.
Spam content, whether user-generated or site generated.
· Unnatural links to and from your site.
· Hacked content on your site
· Content that is stuffed with keywords
· Irrelevant, low or generally spun content
· Underhanded redirection penalties
How to fix a manual penalty?
When you receive a manual penalty notice, you will need to work towards fixing the content on your site. If you do not adhere to these content quality guidelines, then the Google Reviewers can actually flag your site and that can hurt your site rankings. There are a few things that you can do in order to fix the content on your site so that it will now adhere to the Google's quality guidelines, and that you will no longer have a manual penalty flag.
One thing that you can do if your website has some kind of low-quality content is to find these poor-quality pages on your website. You need to either remove that poor quality content from your site pages or then add high-quality content. Or you can take that old content and then improve it in some way. For example, some of the spammy keyword-stuffed content on your site can be replaced with more high-quality stuff that reads more naturally.
You will need to work day by day and slowly to improve various aspects of your site. Another thing that you could do is to check each and every outgoing link on your site. You will need to carefully check each link and then prune out some of those old links which have gone bad. You can organize your links so that you know which ones are following an unnatural pattern, and then you can remove them accordingly.
When you have finished taking the necessary action to change and improve the content on your site, you can then now send a request to Google. Make sure that before you send this reconsideration request, your site content now adheres to the standards. Google's Reviewers will then check your site's content and then remove your manual penalty.