Two veteran SEO consultants say they are seeing more Google manual actions lately, but the evidence so far is anecdotal. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported on October 8 that the claims started with posts on X a day earlier. Google has not commented, so this is a signal to watch, not a confirmed change in enforcement.
Marie Haynes, who has done manual action consulting for about two decades, wrote that she has had “a big increase in requests for help with manual actions lately.” She told Schwartz her inbound requests went “from essentially no requests to several per week.” She also said the level is nowhere near the pre-Penguin era, and that she no longer advertises this kind of work.
The cases she described fall into three groups: “thin content, pure spam, and scaled content.” Her note about who is affected matters more than the labels. “Most of these sites are legitimate long standing businesses,” she wrote. That points away from obvious spam operations and toward established sites that published at volume.
Daniel Foley Carter posted that he has seen more manual actions over recent months. He blames shortcuts and scaled content abuse in the SEO industry, and says businesses that cut SEO spend because AI could do the work are now paying for cleanup. That is his opinion, not a finding. He also says manual actions can cost sites 90 percent or more of their traffic overnight. That figure is his claim, and no data accompanies it.
Schwartz tried to test the idea informally. He collected a dozen recent threads from the Google Webmaster Help Forums, many of them about major spam problems, thin content, scaled content abuse, or reconsideration requests that were rejected. He then asked ChatGPT and Gemini to review the forums. Both said complaints were up, but not by a large margin. The charts they produced disagreed with each other.
That makes the forum check a weak signal. The threads were hand-picked, no baseline was published, and two chatbots could not agree on the shape of the trend. Consultant inboxes carry their own bias, because site owners who get penalized go looking for help. Several requests per week is also a small number.
The theme does fit recent Google commentary. Our October 6 report covered Gary Illyes calling scaled content a bigger problem than link spam. None of the sources in this story connect that remark to manual action volume, and Google has not said whether it changed how many sites human reviewers handle.
For practitioners, the useful point is the difference between two kinds of spam enforcement. A manual action is a human-reviewed decision that appears in the Manual actions report in Search Console, with a named issue and a defined scope. An algorithmic spam update leaves no notice, only a traffic change you have to diagnose. A site that loses traffic should check that report first, because the fix path differs: algorithmic effects wait for systems to reassess the site, while a manual action stays until Google approves a reconsideration request.
A reconsideration request needs to show what was wrong, what you changed, and that the change covered the whole problem. Several forum titles Schwartz collected describe sites with repeated rejections after removing thousands of URLs, which suggests partial cleanups do not pass review. Keep dated records of what you removed or rewrote, and document the reasoning for each decision.
Sites that published AI-assisted or templated pages at volume should open the Manual actions report and audit their thinnest sections now, before a penalty makes the timing for them.
Reported by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable on October 8, 2026, citing posts by Marie Haynes and Daniel Foley Carter on X from October 7, 2026.
