Google has announced 12 new types of manual action penalties that involve violations of Google News and Google Discover policies. This is for the first time that a site could receive a manual penalty for the violations against News and Discover policies.

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A manual penalty is issued by a human reviewer at Google. Manual penalty results in websites or webpages being ranked lower in Google Search. Google has not clear that whether the pages will be removed only from the Discover and News or it implies to Google Search as well.

Google News & Google Discover Manual Actions

Few of Google’s new manual penalties are particular to News, some are specific to Discover, and some involve News and Discover.

Google News Penalties

The one manual penalty that is related to Google News is a violation of the transparency policy. A site may be violating this policy if it displays in Google News and does not give clear bylines and dates and details about the publication, authors, the publisher, company, and contact information.

Google Discover Penalties

There are two manual penalties particular to Google Discover:

• Adult Content: Google has discovered content that has nudity, sex acts, sexually explicit material, or sexually suggestive activities.
• Misleading Content: Google has discovered content that is displayed to mislead users by convincing a story or topic which is not actually shown in the content.

Google News And Google Discover Penalties

Google has added nine manual penalties for the violation of the policies shared between Google News and Google Discover.

• Dangerous Content: Google has figured out content that could have critical and immediate harm to animals or people.
• Hateful Content: Google has discovered content that involves hatred.
• Harassing Content: Google detected content that involves bullying, harassment, or intimidating content.
• Manipulated Media: Google has discovered the video, audio, or image content that has been manipulated to mislead, deceive, or defraud.
• Medical Content: Content that is pointed at offering medical diagnosis, advice for commercial purposes.
• Sexually Explicit Content: Content that has sexual imagery or videos basically intended to create sexual arousal.
• Terrorist Content: Google has discovered content that recommends terrorist or extremist acts, including inciting violence, or celebrating terrorist attacks.
• Violence And Gore Content: Google has figured out the content that glorifies violence.
• Vulgar Profanity & Language: Content that includes gratuitous obscenities or profanities.

Reviving From A Manual Action Penalty

It is possible to recover from a manual action penalty. Google sends out a text to the site owners through Search Console when it issues a manual penalty. Search Console message includes the information on how to recover from the penalty. The process of recovery is basically removing offending content and then submitting a reconsideration request.