Take a breath

If you've just opened Google Search Console and found a manual action for "Unnatural links to your site," your stomach has probably dropped. Your site might have disappeared from search results entirely. Your traffic graph looks like it fell off a cliff.

It's fixable. Thousands of sites have recovered from manual actions. But it takes work, and it takes patience.

What a manual action actually means

A manual action is different from an algorithmic penalty. It means a real person at Google — a member of their webspam team — has looked at your backlink profile and decided that a significant portion of your links violate Google's spam policies.

This usually happens for one of three reasons:

You (or someone you hired) bought links. This is the most common cause. An SEO agency built hundreds of links from directories, guest post networks, or private blog networks. At the time it boosted rankings. Now Google has caught up. You were the target of a negative SEO attack. Someone deliberately pointed spam links at your site. This is known as a negative SEO attack. This is less common, but it happens in competitive niches. You inherited a messy link profile. You bought a domain, took over a business, or inherited a website that had a murky SEO history. The spam links were there before you arrived.

Regardless of the cause, the solution is the same.

Step 1: Find out exactly what you're dealing with

Go to Google Search Console → Security & Manual Actions → Manual Actions. Read the message carefully. It will tell you whether the action is sitewide (affecting your entire domain) or partial (affecting specific pages or sections).

Then pull your complete backlink profile. Google Search Console shows some of your links, but it's not comprehensive. You need a backlink audit tool that pulls data from an independent crawler. You want to see every domain linking to you, along with spam scores and authority metrics.

Step 2: Classify every link

This is the tedious part, but it's the most important. Go through your backlinks and sort them into three piles:

Definitely toxic. Links from obvious spam sites, link farms, PBNs, and domains with no real content. These are easy calls. Suspicious. Links that have some red flags but aren't obviously spam. Maybe a legitimate-looking site with a high spam score, or a directory you're not sure about. These need individual judgement. Definitely clean. Links from real websites with genuine content and traffic. News sites, industry publications, business directories, partners, customers. Leave these alone.

Be thorough but not reckless. The goal is to remove the clearly bad links without accidentally disavowing good ones that help your rankings.

Step 3: Try to get links removed at source

Google wants to see that you made a genuine effort to get the bad links removed before resorting to the disavow tool. For each toxic domain, try to find a contact email and send a brief, professional removal request.

Keep it simple. Something like: "I've identified a link from your website to mine that I believe is low quality. Could you please remove it? The link is on [URL] and points to [your URL]."

Most spam sites won't respond. That's fine — Google knows this. What matters is that you tried and documented the attempt. Save every email you send, and note which ones bounced or went unanswered.

Step 4: Build your disavow file

For every toxic domain that you couldn't get removed manually (which will be most of them), add it to a disavow file. This is a plain text file with one domain per line, formatted like:

domain:spammysite.xyz domain:linkfarm123.top

Include comments explaining your reasoning — it shows Google you did this thoughtfully, not just blanket-disavowed everything.

Be precise. Don't disavow domains you're unsure about just to pad the file. And definitely don't disavow your legitimate links. An over-aggressive disavow file can make your recovery harder, not easier.

Step 5: Submit your reconsideration request

After uploading your disavow file to Search Console, submit a reconsideration request. This goes to the same webspam team that issued the manual action.

Your request should include:

What happened. Explain honestly how the bad links got there. Did you hire a dodgy agency? Were you attacked? Did you not know about the links? Don't make excuses — Google respects honesty. What you did about it. Detail your audit process, your removal requests (how many you sent, how many responded), and your disavow file. What's different now. Explain what's changed so this won't happen again. Fired the agency? Set up monitoring? Changed your approach to link building?

Step 6: Wait

This is the hardest part. Google typically reviews reconsideration requests within 2-4 weeks. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

If your request is approved, the manual action is lifted. But that doesn't mean your rankings bounce back instantly. It can take weeks or months for your pages to recover their previous positions. Google needs to recrawl your site, reprocess your links, and update your rankings.

If your request is denied, Google will tell you why. Usually it means they found additional toxic links you missed. Go back to step 2, do a more thorough audit, update your disavow file, and resubmit.

A few people never do this

I want to be honest: some website owners see a manual action and walk away. They abandon the domain, start fresh on a new one, and write off the old site. For some businesses — especially small ones where the site isn't generating much revenue — that might genuinely be the right call.

But if your domain has any authority, any history, any brand recognition, recovering it is almost always worth the effort. A recovered domain with a clean link profile is a strong asset. A brand new domain starts from zero.

Avoiding this in the future

Our guide on how often you should audit your backlinks covers the practical schedule. And if the root cause was a bad agency, read how to clean up after your old SEO agency for specific steps.

Once you've recovered, set up regular backlink monitoring. Our free backlink checker lets you see what's linking to your site right now, and a full scan classifies every link automatically. Check your profile monthly at minimum. If you hire anyone to do SEO for you, ask specifically about their link building methods. If they promise hundreds of links for cheap, walk away.

The businesses that never face a manual action are the ones that watch their backlink profile the same way they watch their bank account — regularly, carefully, and with a healthy suspicion of anything that looks too good to be true.

I Got a Google Manual Action for Unnatural Links. Now What?