Google has updated its manual actions for Google News and Google Discover a few months back, where they removed the adult-theme and artificial freshening sections, updated the hateful content section and added five new deceptive practices sections.
This change was spotted by Gagan Ghotra who wrote, “last year somewhere between 10th Oct and 27 Nov Google updated Manual Actions for News and Discovers to add some specific policy violations for Deceptive Practices.”
What changed. Google removed two sections:
- Adult-themed content (Discover)
- Artificial freshening (News and Discover)
Google updated one section:
- “News and Discover policy violation: Hateful content” is now “Hateful content (News and Discover)”
Google added five sections on deceptive practices including:
- Deceptive practices: Coordinated deceptive practices (News and Discover): Google has detected content on your site that appears to conceal or misrepresent the site ownership or purpose.
- Deceptive practices: Good neighbor policy (News and Discover): Google has detected content on your site that impersonates or conceals the organization that created the content.
- Deceptive practices: Impersonation (News and Discover): Google has detected content on your site that misrepresents the person or organization that provided the content.
- Deceptive practices: Misrepresentation of affiliation (News and Discover): Google has detected content on your site that seems to misrepresent or conceal the financial or editorial relationships of the content producers.
- Deceptive practices: Misrepresentation of location (News and Discover): Google has detected content on your site that seems to misrepresent or conceal the country of origin of the website.
Here is an image I created showing the side-by-side changes:
Why we care. If you are in the business of creating and publishing content, you will want to review these updated manual actions. Now, while these have been out for a few months now, it is still important to review these changes and scan through the manual action policy violations list every now and then.
Receiving a manual action can be very harmful to your site’s performance both in Google Search, Google News and Google Discover.
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About the author
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and 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.
In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the “US Search Personality Of The Year,” you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O’Clock.
Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.