What is a manual action? Google will issue a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. These manual actions are displayed within Google Search Console and stay there until the manual action is lifted. You can learn more about these manual actions over here.

What do they look like? Here is a screen shot of a manual action:

But many who have manual actions are seeing “no issues detected” in the manual actions viewer within Search Console:

Google is investigating. Waisberg from the Google Search Relations team, who works closely with the Search Console team, said, “Looking into it…” when I asked about it:

More complaints. Here are some of the complaints from the SEO community about the mysteriously missing manual actions:

Why we care. Often seeing a “no issues detected” message in the manual actions viewer within Google Search Console is a reason to smile and celebrate, espesially if the site had a manual action. But do not celebrate or get your hopes up today if you see that. It looks like a bug and Google will probably fix it soon.