News/Discover Manual Action? This is must to get the action lifted?

Recently, I have been working on few news specific manual actions, which were issued by Google in February. And while engaging with the SEO team of that publisher, I noticed that there is a significant lack of skills and understanding of Google's policies.

How to and what changes need to be done for getting a News/Discover manual action lifted?

So basically, what I generally like to do is whatever the manual action is, there might be like so many specific manual actions.

For News/Discover there are so many specific manual actions. Here is a list of all those …..

But the general strategy to get the manual action lifted is to make sure that you provide evidence of changed editorial practices, including new editorial policies. And an editorial board with a history of improved practices. This is what Google has mentioned in their official documentation as well.

But what does this mean is that you need to make sure that on your create a new editorial policies page.

Where you highlight why, how the new policies will make sure that the site’s content will no longer be a violation of specific policies for which violation the manual action was issued in the first place.

And secondly, you need to create a blog post explaining

• What the editorial policies were and what are the new ones

• What is the difference between these two

• How the new editorial policy ensures that users are getting better content, which of course is compliant with Google's Discover/News content policies.

And once you have done that, then you can go ahead and submit a request for getting this manual action lifted in Search Console.

And over there, you can include a message to the web spam team as well, where you explain and provide some evidence explaining why they should lift this manual action and your site should be allowed back to show up across Google surfaces, either it be Search, Discover, News.

While submitting the reconsideration request to get the manual action lifted Google advise to include three things - Explains the exact quality issue on your site, Describes the steps you’ve take to fix the issue and documents the outcome of your effort.

So when submitting the request message to Google’s web spam team
- Start with explaining the issue
- Describe the steps you have taken to change, here mention that you have created new editorial policies (cite links to both new and old policies) and also include link to the blog post which you created explaining the change of policies.

Links to editorial policies change blog post, so that it's clear to the web spam team that you have moved from older to the newer editorial policies. And on the blog post, they can clearly see what specific things you have done to make sure that you are no longer violating Google's policies for which you got the manual action for.

And of course, this is a basic thing that needs to be done. But at the same time, you also have to do some specific things for which the manual action was issued. For example, if it's a misleading content in News/Discover manual action, then in that case, you would have to do things like changing or adjusting the headlines of pages or the featured images of the sample URLs which Google have shared. And also, I recommend to do the same for other similar URLs too.

And if it's a specific manual action for Terrorist content, then you have to remove all that content and then do all this and submit the request to get the manual action lifted.