You Have an Unnatural Links Manual Action. Now What?

An unnatural links manual action means a person on Google’s webspam team reviewed your site and found a pattern of manipulative links to or from it. Until it’s fixed and Google accepts a reconsideration request, some or all of your pages rank lower or drop out of search.

The way out follows the same order every time. Find the links that break Google’s link spam policy, get as many removed as you can, disavow what’s left, then show Google exactly what you did. Google itself warns that skipping the removal step can get a request rejected.

What an Unnatural Links Manual Action Means

Google applies a manual action when a human reviewer decides that pages on a site break its spam policies. Its Manual Actions report documentation says automated systems catch most spam on their own. A manual action is what happens when a person looks at your site and decides a direct penalty is needed.

You’ll find it in Search Console under Security & Manual Actions, then Manual actions. Google also sends a notice to the Search Console message center and by email. If the report shows a green check mark, you don’t have one, no matter what a tool or an agency tells you.

Unnatural Links to Your Site

This is the common one. Google has found a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive or manipulative links pointing at your site. In practice that means links someone paid for, swapped or built through a network, whether it was you, an agency you hired or the domain’s previous owner.

Unnatural Links From Your Site

This version is about your outbound links. Google believes your site is selling links or taking part in a link scheme, for example sponsored posts carrying followed links, or heavy link swapping with partner sites. It’s the notice that publishers who sell guest posts need to watch for.

Site-Wide or Partial Match

Expand the notice and Google lists patterns of affected pages. A single path, such as example.com/blog/*, means only that section is hit. “Affects all pages” means the whole domain. Google also notes that not every page matching a pattern is necessarily affected, so a partial match can be narrower than it looks.

Scope changes how much work the recovery takes, but not what Google expects from you. The guidance is blunt: fix the issue on every affected page. Fixing only some of them will not earn a partial return to search results, and neither will fixing one action while ignoring another.

Manual Action or Algorithmic Devaluation? Check Which One You Have

Plenty of people who search for this don’t have a manual action at all. They have a traffic drop and a backlink tool flashing red. That’s a different problem with a different fix, so open the Manual Actions report before you touch a single link.

The algorithmic side is spelled out in Google’s December 2022 link spam update announcement. Google said SpamBrain neutralizes unnatural links and that any credit those links passed is lost. There’s no request for that, and no disavow file will bring the value back.

Why Google Issued the Manual Action

The notice doesn’t list the offending links, so you work backwards from Google’s link spam policy. It defines link spam as links created to or from a site mainly to manipulate rankings. When we review a penalized profile, the cause usually traces back to one or more of these:

• ➜ Paid links that pass ranking credit. Money, goods or services exchanged for followed links count as link spam. Google allows paid links only when they carry rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow”.
• ➜ Optimized anchors in guest posts and press releases. Google names keyword-rich anchors in articles distributed on other sites as a violation, which catches a lot of scaled guest posting.
• ➜ Private blog networks. Sites built only to pass links leave footprints a reviewer can follow. Our guide to PBN link risks explains how those networks usually get exposed.
• ➜ Excessive link exchanges. “Link to me and I’ll link to you” at scale, or partner pages that exist only to cross-link.
• ➜ Low-quality directories, bookmarks, and template links. Cheap sitewide footer or widget links are easy for reviewers to spot.
• ➜ A previous owner. If you bought the domain, the links may be older than your ownership. Google has specific instructions for this, covered in the FAQ below.

There’s also a newer route to a notice. In April 2026, Google clarified that it may use spam report submissions to take manual action, and may pass the reporter’s written text to the site owner word for word. If your notice includes a written description of the problem, it may have started with a report.

What Google Needs to See Before It Lifts the Action

The review isn’t a test of whether your profile is now spotless. It checks that you understood the problem, made a real effort to fix it and can prove it. Google says a good request explains the exact issue, describes the steps you took and documents the outcome of those steps.

For an unnatural links manual action, Google adds a specific warning. Blindly adding every backlink to a disavow file isn’t a good-faith effort, and disavowing everything without trying to remove anything might lead to rejection. Google asks for documentation of links you had removed and an explanation of the ones you couldn’t.

How to Fix Unnatural Links to Your Site

Build the Fullest Link List You Can

Start in Search Console. The Links report exports external links by top linking sites or by latest links. When the list is large, Google suggests starting with the sites that link to you most and any links created in the last few months.

Don’t treat that export as the whole picture. Google says the Links report shows a sample of your links, tables stop at 1,000 rows and exports cap at 100,000 rows. Pull the same data from a third-party index such as Ahrefs, Semrush or Majestic, then merge everything by domain.

Sort Every Link Into Keep, Remove or Disavow

Work at domain level first. Unnatural links tend to arrive in clusters, so one bad domain often explains dozens of URLs. Judge each domain against Google’s policy rather than a tool’s toxicity score, because a score is only a guess at risk and the reviewer is judging intent.

Anchor text is often the quickest tell. If a big share of your anchors are exact-match commercial phrases, the links carrying them deserve the first look. Use an anchor text ratio calculator to understand how your branded, exact, and generic split compares.

For the domains in the grey zone, look at the linking site itself. Does it have real traffic, and is the content written for readers or only to host links? We cover the signals we check in our guide on how to check backlink quality.

Ask for Removals and Keep the Evidence

Contact the owner of each site you marked for removal and ask them to delete the link, or add rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” to it. Keep the message short and specific. Busy site owners act on requests that tell them exactly which link and which page.

Log every attempt in a sheet: domain, linking URL, contact method, date sent, follow-up date and result. That sheet becomes the backbone of your reconsideration request. Send one follow-up about a week later, then move the domain to your disavow list if you still hear nothing.

Don’t pay removal fees. Some owners charge to take links down, and Google has said you can flag sites that charge for removal in your reconsideration request. Note the fee in your log, disavow the domain and move on.

Check every reported fix before you count it. Use a backlink status checker to confirm whether a link is still live on the page, which matters because an owner may remove one link and miss a second one on the same page.

When an owner says they added nofollow instead of deleting the link, run the page through our dofollow and nofollow link checker. Marking a link as fixed when the attribute never went live is an easy way to fail a review.

Disavow Only What You Couldn’t Remove

Google calls the disavow links tool an advanced feature that can harm your search performance if you use it wrongly. During a manual action it has one clear job: covering the links you tried and failed to get removed. Use the domain: operator when a site has several bad links to you.

# Removal requested twice, no reply
domain:example-link-network.com

# Owner asked for a removal fee
https://example-blog.net/sponsored-review/

Lines starting with # are notes for you and are ignored by Google. The tool supports one disavow file per site, shared by every owner of the property, so add to your existing list rather than uploading a fresh one that drops earlier entries.

Submit the Reconsideration Request

When every affected link has been removed or disavowed, open the Manual Actions report and select Request Review. Include documentation of the links you removed and an explanation of the ones you couldn’t. Share your outreach log as a view-only Google Sheet rather than pasting it into the form.

How to Fix Unnatural Links From Your Site

The outbound version is easier to fix because every link sits on a site you control. Google asks you to find links that were paid for or break its link spam policy, such as excessive exchanges. Then remove them, or stop them from passing PageRank with rel=”nofollow” or a more specific attribute.

Start with sponsored posts, guest posts you accepted, partner pages, and sitewide footer links. Our links analyzer lists every outbound link on a page with its anchor and follow status, which speeds up checking old sponsored articles one by one.

Going forward, mark paid placements with rel=”sponsored” as Google’s guidance on qualifying outbound links describes. In the request, list the pages you edited, the links you removed or requalified, and the policy you now apply to anything paid.

A Reconsideration Request That Gets Accepted

Reviewers read a lot of these, and the requests that get through are short and specific. They admit the cause, show the work and explain what stops it happening again. The template below follows Google’s own three-part checklist. Replace every bracket with your details and cut what doesn’t apply.

The parts that do the heavy lifting are the numbers and the log. A reviewer can’t check a promise, but a dated log lets them spot-check a few domains and see that the removal attempts really happened. Vague requests give them nothing to check.

How Long Google Takes to Review It

You’ll see confident numbers online: two to four weeks per round, three to six months for site-wide cases, even “a few days”. None of them come from Google. Google only says most reviews take several days or weeks, and link-related ones, like an unnatural links manual action, may take longer.

You get an email when Google receives your request and another when the review ends. Google asks site owners not to resubmit while a request is pending. On a large profile, budget for more than one round, because a first pass through thousands of linking domains can easily miss a pattern.

What to Do If Your Request Is Rejected

If the rejection includes example links, treat them as a sample rather than the full list. Find the pattern behind them, whether it’s a network, a vendor or one anchor phrase, then search your merged link data for everything else that matches before you do anything else.

Extend the outreach to the new domains, update the log and the disavow file, then write a fresh request that explains what the first round missed and how you found it. Sending the first request again word for word tells the reviewer that nothing has changed.

What Happens to Your Rankings After It’s Lifted

This is the part most guides leave out. Lifting an unnatural links manual action removes the penalty, but it doesn’t return the value those links used to pass. You removed or disavowed them, so they no longer count. If they were propping up your rankings before, expect rankings to settle below the old peak.

Growth from here comes from links Google is happy to count, meaning coverage and mentions a site chose to give you. That’s slower than buying followed links, but it won’t put you back in the report. Our breakdown of white hat vs black hat link building shows where that line sits.

Keep an eye on things for a while. Check the Manual Actions report after any change of agency or vendor, and review new links monthly for the first few months. A second manual action on the same site is harder to explain in a request than the first one.

FAQs