Manual Action

A ranking penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google after identifying a violation of their webmaster guidelines. Manual actions typically target unnatural backlink patterns, thin content, or cloaking, and must be resolved through a reconsideration request.

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Related Terms

Meta Description

A brief HTML attribute summarizing a page's content that often appears as the snippet beneath the title in search results. While not a direct ranking factor, a compelling meta description increases click-through rate, which indirectly benefits SEO.

Meta Keywords

An HTML meta tag once used to declare a page's target search terms. Google has ignored meta keywords for ranking purposes since 2009, though a few minor search engines still consider them.

Meta Redirect

An HTML meta refresh tag that automatically forwards visitors to a different URL after a set number of seconds. Server-side 301 redirects are preferred because they pass link equity more reliably and don't create a delay for users.

Meta Robots Tag

An HTML directive that tells search engine crawlers whether to index a page and whether to follow its links. Common values like "noindex, nofollow" give you page-level control over what appears in search results.

Meta Tags

HTML elements placed in a page's head section that communicate information about the page to search engines and browsers — including title tags, meta descriptions, robots directives, and viewport settings.

Mirror Site

An exact replica of a website hosted on a separate server or domain, typically used for load balancing or geographic redundancy. Without canonical tags pointing to the original, mirror sites create massive duplicate content problems.