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Yesterday we reported that Google launched a whole set of new manual actions for Google News and Google Discover. The good news is that Google said a manual action for Google News or Google Discover will not impact how you do in Google Search. It will just impact your performance
Danny Sullivan of Google said on Twitter "if you get one for Discover, that's only for Discover. Doesn't impact Search."
So it sounds like manual actions issued for Google News won't impact your performance in Google Search. And it sounds like manual actions issued for Google Discover won't impact your performance in Google Search.
The reason the question came up is because there are specific policy violations that may violate Google Discover or Google News but do not violate Google's Search policies. Such as adult-themed content, medical content and others.
Let me share some of the back and forth on Twitter on this:
News and Discover are entirely separate products.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 8, 2021
News includes newsy-content, not just news publishers.
Discover includes content from across the web, not just news content.
Manual actions can happen for either; if issued, they only involve the particular product issued for.
But occasionally, we might find a site is having content that violates policies, and manual actions are basically a way to say "Hey, you might want to look at this," in case there are simply changes they can make that help.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 8, 2021
This is already covered on our News and Discover policies pages -- which themselves aren't new. We may remove just piece of content or in repeated situations, entire sites.https://t.co/tGgNgCmZ02https://t.co/LTIvPVyTpV pic.twitter.com/FqmLxNmKCx
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 8, 2021
I don't understand why this is causing a concern. If you didn't want to be in Discover, and you get a manual action saying you can't have such-and-such content in Discover, then you're getting what you want....
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 8, 2021
That's because our systems are already automatically only trying to show good, relevant and non-policy violating content.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 8, 2021
The Discover policies aren't new. They could have gotten manual actions before if this was a big issue for them. We've just made it so they'd be delivered better via Search Console. They haven't before, I assume, so they're probably fine...
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 8, 2021
But if our systems weren't catching things for whatever reason, then we might take a manual action.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 8, 2021
I hear the concern...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
