Over last couple of days I have got to know that Google is issuing Misleading Content (News/Discover) manual actions and removing sites from getting visibility in both News/Discover (some cases which I have reviewed its for Discover only for some reason).
Google defines Misleading content (News and Discover) manual action as “Google has detected content on your site that appears to violate our misleading content policy and misleads users into engaging with it by promising details which are not reflected in the content.” and to get this lifted Google recommends to align the site such that there isn’t any violation of Discover content policies.
Also on the same Discover content policies, Google mentions Misleading content and says “We don’t allow preview content that misleads users to engage with it by promising details which aren’t reflected in the underlying content.“
I think by “preview content” here Google means the featured image and title which it shows in Discover feed.
Below is an example and frankly the image if someone asks me is kind of misleading!!
And its not only the case with this specific article in my Discover feed. Given how Google is defining misleading content, If I were Google I would have issued Manual Actions for almost all of sites which usually show up in my Discover feed.
Its all just clickbait and misleading preview content.
But it seems like its just that some publishers get caught by Google while others do, but most of publishers nowadays are doing clickbait and have misleading preview content so as to encourage users to click through to their pages from Discover.
Steps which I recommend publishers to get this Misleading Content (News/Discover) Manual Action lifted
Also a quick note these are just general steps and don’t guarantee that manual action after doing all this will be lifted for sure! I hate to say but It depends upon a number of factors and if you got this manual action then best way is to engage some SEO professional to help you out.
1) Implement noindex on the pages which Google have mentioned as sample pages in Search Console Manual Actions report. Also ensure that those pages aren’t blocked in robots.txt file of the site.
2) Remove all internal links to those pages violating pages.
3) Update all pages which Google mention in the manual action in Search Console.
Their headlines/titles/meta descriptions to reflect what’s on the page.
Easy way to do this is to just take regular content on the page (excluding headings/titles) then take content of page and enter in ChatGPT, ask it to generate most descriptive titles, headlines and meta descriptions for those pages. Same can be done for feature images of pages too, just need to provide ChatGPT with different images & content of page (excluding headings/titles) and ask if a image is descriptive of that content vs not.
Once got the right and descriptive headings/titles, featured image then implement those on the pages.
4) If there is an editorial policy or related page on the site, then over there include a section saying “Transparency” and under it write 300 to 400 words explaining
– Why we as (site name) care about providing accurate & detailed information?
– How our (site name) editorial team ensures that users are satisfied with our content?
– Why it matters to us (site name) that we fulfil users information needs
– How (site name) always aim to provide best user experience by serving them what they are looking for?
5) Then request lifting of manual action in Search Console and in the message provide some information about what specifically you have done, for example below.
We have implemented noindex on all the policy violating pages, which means these are no longer showing up in Google Search. And on top of this we have updated information on those pages to ensure alignment of headings/titles/featured images with what content we are providing on the page. Also to further provide clarity and make sure that we are providing amazing experience to our users, we have specifically made changes on our editorial policy page (add link to the policy page here) to reflect that we always aim to provide accurate, detailed information on our pages such that after reading the page our users get what they are looking for.
That’s it
Doing all this have worked out in the past for client sites which got Misleading Content (News/Discover). Back in Aug 2024, as I posted on X too, 7 different sites that I was doing SEO consulting for were hit by this manual action. Even though I still think those manual actions were just random and shouldn’t have been issued by Google but unfortunately they were.
But we adjusted the whole site as per the steps which I have mentioned above and got these manual actions lifted, all of these 7 sites are doing really well in both News and Discover nowadays.
Anyway let me know in comments below if you have any question about this.
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