It is rarely considered a nuisance to assert that a website has been penalised through a manual action by Google’s search quality team for the violation of their webmaster guidelines. The aforementioned guidelines are built for a fair and positive user search experience. A manual action can be invoked for issues such as unnatural link building, keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden texts, and other deceptive modes of hacking SEO. Manual action causes search engine rankings of the website to drop dramatically, bringing with it an immediate and severe loss in organic traffic. The recovery from manual action involves pinpointing and correcting the problem areas, applying for a reconsideration request in Google, and proving that the website is now compliant with its guidelines. This whole process can take weeks or months and can be tricky, which, therefore, becomes even more important for webmasters to try and follow Google’s webmaster guidelines from the beginning. Putting it mildly, a manual action can ruin years of hard work and have far-reaching detrimental effects on a website for its online visibility and presence.