Slide 35 of 39
How Does an SEO Company Identify and Fix SEO Penalties?
“Penalty” covers three problems, and an SEO company checks them in a fixed order: Search Console’s Manual Actions report, which shows whether a Google reviewer has acted; whether the drop date matches a confirmed spam or core update; and whether the site carries a large volume of manipulative links, which is a reason to audit, not proof of cause. Each answer leads to a different fix and recovery time.
If none of the three explains the drop, it is not a penalty; start with what steps an SEO company takes to recover lost rankings. If the drop lines up with a core update, see how an SEO company handles Google algorithm updates.
Step 1: Check the Manual Actions Report
The report in Search Console is where Google shows that a reviewer has applied a manual action. If it says no issues were detected, the problem is not a manual action, and there is no action for a reconsideration request to address. If it lists an action, it names the category and the affected pages, and the fix depends on the category. Google’s manual actions help page lists types including:
- Site abused with third-party spam
- User-generated spam
- Spammy free host
- Structured data issue
- Unnatural links to your site
- Unnatural links from your site
- Thin content with little or no added value
- Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects
- Major spam problems (such as scaled content abuse or cloaking)
- Cloaked images
- Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
- Sneaky mobile redirects
The categories call for opposite work. A third-party spam action means removing or blocking the spammy content on your site and leaves backlinks alone; an “unnatural links to your site” action is about backlinks. A structured data issue, under Google’s structured data policies, removes rich result eligibility and does not affect how the page ranks in web search.
Step 2: Match the Drop Date Against Confirmed Updates
When there is no manual action, compare the date of the drop with Google’s Search Status Dashboard, which lists every confirmed ranking update with its start date and duration. In 2026 so far it shows a March spam update that ran 19 hours 30 minutes, core updates starting March 27 and May 21, and spam updates in June, August and September.
Google does not issue “algorithmic penalties” the way it issues manual actions. Its automated systems evaluate sites against the spam policies continuously. SpamBrain, Google’s AI-based spam-prevention system, was launched in 2018 and named publicly in Google’s webspam report for 2021, published in April 2022. Google’s December 2022 link spam update said SpamBrain can detect “both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.” In March 2024, Google announced new and improved spam policies: it strengthened its long-standing policy on scaled content abuse, added site reputation abuse (enforced from May 5, 2024) and began treating expired domain abuse as spam.
What happens after a fix depends on the update type. Google’s spam updates documentation says changes “may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies”. For a link spam update it warns that fixing things “might not generate an improvement” because the ranking benefit those links once provided “cannot be regained.” Plan the budget around that: some lost ground is not coming back.
Step 3: Audit the Link Profile Before Any Disavow
A backlink audit separates what to remove, what to disavow and what to leave alone. Asked whether Ahrefs has a pre-defined “spam score” for filtering bad links, its help center answers: “No. We don’t have such a score.” So in Ahrefs the agency reviews referring domains, anchor text and link growth by hand; Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool and Majestic’s Trust Flow are other inputs. None of these is a Google signal.
| Link type found | Action |
|---|---|
| Old links from low-value directories or expired guest-post networks | Leave alone unless they are part of a manual action or a large pattern; then ask for removal first |
| Clear paid link schemes or a negative SEO attack, in large numbers | Disavow if a manual action exists or is likely |
| Low-authority links that are not clearly spam | Leave alone |
Google’s disavow help page sets the bar: “In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use this tool.” It recommends disavowing only when a site has a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links and those links have caused, or likely will cause, a manual action. The same page warns: “If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google Search results.” Disavowing healthy links during a cleanup is that kind of misuse.
Building and Uploading a Disavow File
Google’s format rules:
- A
.txtfile encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII, one URL or domain per line, up to 100,000 lines and 2MB. - Prefix a domain with
domain:; an entire subpath such as a folder cannot be disavowed. - Lines starting with
#are comments that Google ignores, which makes them the place to record why each entry was added. - Only a property owner can upload, one list per property; a new upload replaces the old list, so keep the full list in one file.
- The list applies only to the property it was uploaded to and its child properties, so separate http and https properties each need it. The tool does not support Domain properties.
An example with placeholder domains:
# Disavow file, updated after the backlink audit
# Domain-level: paid link network found in the audit
domain:cheap-links-network.example
domain:expired-pbn-site.example
# URL-level: one spam page, not the whole domain
http://low-quality-directory.example/listings/spam-page.htmlGoogle says it can take a few weeks to incorporate the list as it recrawls and reprocesses pages, and that disavowed links “will continue to be shown in the Links report.” A disavow does not make links disappear from Search Console or from third-party tools, so their continued presence is not a sign the file failed.
Filing a Reconsideration Request
Request a review only after every affected page is fixed, not just the sample URLs in the report. Google’s manual actions page says a good request does three things: explains the exact quality issue, describes the steps taken to fix it, and documents the outcome. For link actions, Google expects a good-faith effort to remove links first; it states that blindly adding all backlinks to the disavow file “is not considered a good-faith effort”.
How Long Penalty Recovery Takes
| Situation | What Google says |
|---|---|
| Manual action review | Most reconsideration reviews can take several days or weeks; link-related requests may take longer |
| Disavow processing | A few weeks to incorporate the list |
| Drop after a spam update | Improvement may come over a period of months once systems learn the site complies; benefit from spammy links cannot be regained |
The rows above draw on Google’s manual actions help, disavow help and spam updates documentation. A drop that matches a core update is not a penalty; its timeline is part of recovering rankings after a drop with no manual action. After a manual action is lifted, any recovery comes only as Google recrawls the fixed pages, and Google publishes no recovery timetable beyond these statements, so treat any precise day count from an agency as an estimate.
What to Monitor After the Fix
- The Manual Actions report, weekly, until the action clears.
- The Page indexing report, to confirm Google is recrawling the fixed or removed pages.
- Rankings and clicks for the affected URL group, separated from the rest of the site, since unrelated pages moving the other way can hide a partial recovery.
- New links arriving after the cleanup. Disavowed links stay visible, so watch for new manipulative ones rather than waiting for old ones to vanish.
For the wider judgment of the campaign, put these numbers into the framework in how an SEO company measures SEO campaign success.
If Your Traffic Dropped This Week
Open the Manual Actions report first. If it shows no issues, compare the drop date with the Search Status Dashboard. If neither explains the drop, move to a technical audit. Do not file a reconsideration request or upload a disavow file until one of those checks points to it.