Google has recently published additional 12 new types of manual penalty, including violations of Google Discover and Google News Policies.
The current update marks the first time penalty can be received for violations of News and Discover policies. Earlier penalties were only applied to Search, but now, as it has now been extended to Google News and Discover, webmasters will have to keep a watch on it.
Google has automated and manual penalties that are levied when a website is not compliant with Google’s guidelines. Out of both, manual penalties are something in which the reviewer manually reviews the website at Google, and it is considered a more serious one in the Search community.
Usually, manual penalties mean the website rankings will be affected, and its visibility will decrease. However, no one is sure of how violating Google News and Discover policies will affect the website. Even the Google help page has not specified if the pages will be demoted or removed from Discover or News or removed from Google Search.
Manual Action Types
Some of the newly added Google Penalties are for Google News, and a couple of them are apt for Discover, but majorly all the new penalties are for both.
Google News
One of the penalties specific to Google News is the violation of the transparency policy. A penalty will be applied if the website is shown in Google News and if they don’t provide such as dates and bylines. It also includes missing data about the author, contact information, publication, publishing company, and network behind it.
Google Discover
There are two specific penalties for Google Discover:
- Sexual or Adult-themed Content: Google discovers the content to be adult-themed, featuring nudity, sex acts, sexually aggressive content, sexually suggestive activities, or sexually explicit material.
- Misleading Content: Google discovers the content to be misleading, with the title of the content being different from what’s covered in the content.
Some of the commonly shared penalties for Google Discover and Google News are given below.
- Dangerous content: Google sees the content as being dangerous, which may cause harm to individuals or any other living being.
- Harassing content: Google sees the content as a form of harassment or bullying.
- Hateful content: Google sees the content as hateful and a source of discomfort to the community.
- Manipulated media: Google has detected that the content, be it audio, video, or image content, has been tampered with to mislead, deceive and defraud, etc.
- Medical content: Google sees content providing medical advice, treatment for commercial purposes.
- Sexually explicit content: Google sees the content contains sexual imagery and video to arouse someone sexually.
- Terrorist content: Google sees the content promoting terrorist or extremist acts, including praising a terrorist attack.
- Violence and gore content: Google sees the content that can incite or patronize violence as Google does not allow extremely graphic or violent materials.
- Vulgar language and profanity: Google sees the content containing vulgar language and profanity.
Manual Penalty Recovery
Manually penalty recovery takes some time and some bit of work. Generally, Google sends the information of manual penalty to the webmaster in the Google Search Console and detailed information on the penalty. They also give details on how to recover from the manual penalty. Usually, a webmaster has to remove the problematic information and then submit the reconsideration request to Google.
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