The days after the Google March 2024 spam and core updates were released, Google issued tons of manual actions. They were mostly pure spam manual actions that resulted in all or parts of a website being deindexed for violating Google's search spam policies, as Google calls it. Most, if not all, of those sites that were hit have not recovered yet.
Glenn Gabe has been tracking 1,000 websites hit by these manual actions and two weeks later, none of those 1,000 sites saw any sort of recovery. Glenn wrote on X, "I ran the visibility numbers for 1,000 sites deindexed by pure spam manual actions and the drops are insane. I didn't see one bounce back, get reindexed, etc. out of the 1K list. Here are two examples showing visibility drops across both ahrefs and semrush."
Here are those charts:
As a reminder, Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google's spam policies. Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate the Google search index. Most issues reported here will result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual indication to the user, Google said.
Just to be clear, those impacted by the March 2024 core update will not receive manual actions. Algorithmic updates do not lead to notifications in Search Console, no matter how badly we all want an automated action viewer in Search Console. It is also possible to be hit by a manual action and also an algorithmic penalty (Google does not like to call them penalties).
Marie Haynes added about these specific manual actions, "The manual actions given out by Google were incredibly harsh. I've seen sites given unnatural links, thin content, and most commonly, pure spam manual actions recently. Some were affiliate blogs that worked for years on creating content that really is pretty decent."
I saw some people claim they recovered but I am not sure...
Quick Manual Actions Update: I ran the visibility numbers for 1,000 sites deindexed by pure spam manual actions and the drops are insane. I didn't see one bounce back, get reindexed, etc. out of the 1K list. Here are two examples showing visibility drops across both ahrefs and… pic.twitter.com/3vYMvtHpiT
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 20, 2024
Forum discussion at X.
