Violationa of Google News and Discover Guidelines Can Now Result in Manual Penalties.

Google has 12 new types of manual action penalties that involve violation of Google News and Google Discover policies. This is the first time that any website can get a manual sanction for violation of policies related to Google News and Discovery.

Google issues this manual sanction against a website when a human reviewer finds that the pages on the website are not compliant with the company’s quality guidelines. The Google help page does not clear whether the page will be deleted/demoted only from Discover and News, or whether the sanction will extend to Google Search as well.

Whatever, the main thing is that every website owner must sure to avoid these penalties. The manual actions are the most serious of all Google sanctions and need serious efforts to recover from them.

Google News Penalties

The only manual sanction specific to Google News concerns violations of the transparency policy. A site may be found in violation of the policy if it appears in the Google News and does not provide clear copy and dates, as well as information about the author, publication, publisher, company, or network behind and contact details.

Google Discover Penalties

There are mainly two manual penalties in Google Discover. They include:

• Adult-themed Content: Google has detected content that contains nudity, sexual acts, sexual activity, or sexually explicit content.
• Misleading Content: Google has detected content that appears to mislead users by promising a topic or story that is not available in the content.

Google News and Google Discover Penalties

There are nine manual penalties for violations of policies which are shared between Google News and Google Discover both. They include:

• Dangerous Content: Google has found any content on your website that could cause serious and immediate harm to people or animals.
• Harassing content: Google has detected content that contains harassment, bullying or threatening content.
• Hateful Content: Google has detected content that stimulates hatred.
• Media manipulated: Google has detected audio, video or image content that has been manipulated to deceive, defraud, or mislead.
• Medical content: Google has detected content intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment for commercial purposes.
• Sexually Explicit Content: Google has detected content that contains images or videos of an explicit sexual nature primarily intended to induce sexual arousal.
• Terrorist content: Google has found any content that promotes terrorist or extremist acts, such as recruiting, inciting violence, or celebrating terrorist attacks.
• Violence and gory content: Google has detected content that provokes or glorifies violence. Google does not allow any graphic or violent content that may disgust others.
• Vulgar language and profanity: Google has found any content which contains obscenities or profanity-free of charge.

Recovery from Manual Action Penalty

If you get a manual penalty from Google, recovery from this action is possible, but it takes time and work. All is not lost. When Google issues a manual penalty, it sends a message to the website owner through Search Console with steps on how to recover from it. Just follow the steps and clean up the things Google pinpointed and avoid these issues in the future by following the Webmaster Guidelines .