12 New Manual Penalties for Google News & Google Discover

[Ryuzaki]

The age of manual penalties seemed over for a while with Google doing well with ignoring most links they don't like. You have to be doing some really bad stuff like selling links or using PBNs or cloaking for googlebot to get the traditional manual penalties any more.

But with Google News and Google Discover, there's more content-related problems than link problems, so Google has rolled out 12 new types of manual penalties. They are as listed below:

Google News Penalties​

• Transparency Violation - The site does not provide clear dates and bylines, as well as information about authors, the publication, the publisher, company or network behind it, and contact information.

Google Discover Penalties​

• Adult-Themed Content - Google has detected content that contains nudity, sex acts, sexually suggestive activities, or sexually explicit material.
• Misleading Content - Google has detected content that appears to mislead users by promising a topic or story which is not reflected in the content.

Google News & Google Discover Penalties​

These can be applied for either the News or Discover sections or both.

• Dangerous Content - Google has detected content 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 incites hatred.
• Manipulated Media - Google has detected audio, video or image content that has been manipulated to deceive, defraud, or mislead.
• Medical Content - Google has detected content aimed at providing medical advice, diagnosis or treatment for commercial purposes.
• Sexually Explicit Content - Google has detected content that contains explicit sexual imagery or videos primarily intended to cause sexual arousal.
• Terrorist Content - Google has detected content that promotes terrorist or extremist acts, including recruitment, inciting violence, or celebrating terrorist attacks.
• Violence and Gore Content - Google has detected content that incites or glorifies violence. Google does not allow extremely graphic or violent materials for the sake of disgusting others.
• Vulgar Language and Profanity - Google has detected content that contains gratuitous obscenities or profanities.

Manual Penalty Recovery​

As usual, you'll get a message in Search Console that will give you hints about what the offending content is. Then you get to hope you find it all and delete it, then do a reconsideration request.

If you're in Google News (and most of us hit Discover, so just be family friendly and no bait-and-switching users), you might want to watch out for exaggerated viral content, "fake news", stunts or pranks, or anything YMYL with a commercial bent to it.

Good luck out there!