In the past 2 years, Google has fundamentally changed the way they understand and position websites in search. While manual action penalties are still issues to particularly egregious breaches of their webmaster guidelines, Google has invested in algorithms that reward websites that align with their search guidelines. As part of this, the E-A-T (expertise, authority and trust) update has become a key part of ranking websites effectively.
In the past few years, Google has fundamentally changed the way it understands and position websites in search. While manual action penalties are still issues to particularly egregious breaches of the webmaster guidelines, Google has invested in algorithms that reward websites that align with the search guidelines. As part of this, the E-A-T (expertise, authority and trust) update has become a key part of ranking websites effectively.
The impact felt and strategy for recovery differs greatly depending on your situation. A manual action penalty is a human-issued penalty from the Google team themselves, which will be a reaction to particular actions or issues present on your website. This will heavily impact your visibility and it is critical to fix the highlighted issues for the penalty in order to recover performance. Traffic loss from an algorithm update is different in nature; instead of demoting websites based on ranking metrics, a loss of ranking is typically due to a competitor doing something right, leading to a boost in theirs. Recovery here takes into account competitor strategies to ideate the path to success for your individual business case.
