EPIC INSIGHTS

Edition 41  ·  Oct 13, 2026

 

THE BIG STORY

Most of what Google does to your rankings happens without a word. Core updates don't send a letter, and neither do spam updates like the one that finished rolling out Oct 8. The big exception is a manual action: a person on Google's team reviews your site, decides it breaks Google's spam rules, and pushes it down or out of the results. Google says it'll tell you when that happens, in Search Console, its free dashboard for site owners.

Credit where it's due: this is Google at its most helpful. A manual action names the problem, lists the pages involved, and gives you a button to request a review once it's fixed. Google says most reviews take several days or weeks. After an algorithm update, you get none of that.

Why bring it up now? Consultants who handle these penalties say they've picked up in recent weeks. One longtime specialist went from essentially no requests to several a week, mostly from longstanding, legitimate businesses. Google hasn't confirmed a rise, so treat it as a trend worth watching, not an emergency. The usual triggers are thin pages, pages churned out in bulk, and spam someone else slipped onto a site after breaking in.

Here's where it gets interesting. Those messages go to the people listed as owners and full users on your Search Console account, and by email unless they've switched notifications off. Google also emails owners when someone new gets added, which is how you'd find out about a break-in. If the only owner is the designer who built your site years ago, or an inbox nobody opens, those messages pile up unread.

A penalty you know about is a to-do list. One you don't know about looks like a slow month that never ends.

 

QUICK HITS

 

ASK EPIC

Breathe. Almost certainly not.

Those emails are Search Console doing housekeeping. Google finds pages it decides not to show, like an old address that now redirects, a duplicate, or a page it hasn't gotten around to yet, and it lets you know. Healthy sites get these all the time, and most need nothing from you.

A penalty looks different. The email says "manual action" right in it, names the rule Google thinks you broke, and points you to the Manual actions report. You won't have to squint to figure out which kind you got.

So here's our rule of thumb. An indexing email? Forward it to us if you're curious and we'll translate. A manual action email? Call us that day, and don't start deleting pages in a panic first.

And if you've never gotten an email from Search Console at all, that might be the more interesting question.

 

WHAT EPIC'S DOING FOR YOU THIS WEEK

This week we're checking who has access to Search Console on the sites we manage, flagging anyone who shouldn't still be there, and making sure warnings land in an inbox our team reads. We're updating Ninja Forms on the WordPress sites we maintain and looking for admin accounts nobody recognizes. And we're watching traffic now that the spam update has finished. Anything that needs you will show up in your Client Center.