If you have ever wondered if Google hands out manual actions in secret, without ever sending a manual action notice to the site owner, the answer is no. Google will always send a notice to a site owner when manual action is taken.

Juan Felipe Rincón, part of the Google manual actions team at Google, spoke at SMX West earlier this month about all aspects of manual actions.  “No manual actions are done without a notice,” Rincón confirmed.

Now, it isn’t clear when this practice began, since Google hasn’t always sent manual action notices.  But for the last several years, Google has sent a wide variety of manual action notices to webmasters via email and through Google Search Console (and Google Webmaster Tools before that.)

Of course, there are a wide range of algorithmic signals that can cause major issues with a site… but these are algorithmic, as they are automatically applied through Google’s search algorithm and not manually applied by someone within Google.  And depending on how poor quality a site is, they can be nearly as devastating as a manual action.