Content revised 20 October 2026.
Start by identifying what actually happened. A manual action, an indexing problem and a fall in rankings need different investigations; one recovery checklist can't explain every decline.
Check evidence before naming the problem
Confirm the dates and affected pages in Search Console and your analytics. Check that tracking still works and that you're comparing the same search type, country and device. A decline in recorded sessions after a tracking change is not enough to diagnose a search penalty. Keep a timeline of deployments and other changes.
If there is a manual action
Read the Manual Actions report and its examples carefully. Identify the scope and the policy issue described, then fix the underlying problem across the relevant content or links. Keep a clear record of the changes. Where a review request is available, explain what was wrong and what you corrected rather than submitting a general promise to do better.
If there is no manual action notice
- Inspect representative URLs for indexing and access problems.
- Check unexpected noindex tags, canonical changes, redirects and server failures.
- Compare lost queries and page types to find a pattern.
- Review relevance, competition and content usefulness without assuming every decline has one cause.
Choose a measured recovery plan
Prioritise demonstrated faults and monitor after fixes. Avoid deleting large amounts of content or disavowing a whole link profile without a reason tied to evidence. Some changes require recrawling and reassessment, and no provider can promise that every previous position will return. A useful audit explains the diagnosis, the proposed fix and how you will judge its result.
Official guidance: Google’s Manual Actions report.