"News and Discover policy violations" manual actions for publishers
This entry in the Manual actions report means "You have violated content policies for Google News and/or Discover," followed by a specific violation type. Google's help page frames these as breaches of the News and Discover content policies, so your eligibility for those surfaces is what is at stake; the page does not describe an effect on ordinary web results.
The review bar is different from spam actions. For almost every type, Google asks you to fix the pages and then "provide evidence of changed editorial practices including new editorial policies and an editorial board with a history of improved practices." A quick edit is rarely enough; reviewers want to see how the publication now works.
The violation types Google lists
| Type | What Google found |
|---|---|
| Dangerous content | Content that could directly facilitate serious and immediate harm |
| Deceptive practices: Coordinated deceptive practices | Concealed or misrepresented ownership or purpose |
| Deceptive practices: Good neighbor policy | Impersonating or concealing the organization that made the content |
| Deceptive practices: Impersonation | Misrepresenting the person or organization providing content |
| Deceptive practices: Misrepresentation of affiliation | Hidden financial or editorial ties to governments or political groups |
| Deceptive practices: Misrepresentation of location | Hidden or false country of origin |
| Harassing content | Harassment, bullying, threats, exposing private information |
| Hateful content | Content inciting hatred against a group or individual |
| Manipulated media | Deceptively altered audio, video or images that may cause significant harm |
| Medical content | Content contradicting scientific or medical consensus |
| Misleading content | Headlines or previews promising details the content lacks |
| Sexually explicit content | Explicit imagery or video meant to arouse |
| Terrorist content | Promoting or recruiting for terrorism |
| Transparency | Missing dates, bylines, author, publisher or contact information |
| Violence and gore content | Glorifying violence or gratuitously graphic material |
| Vulgar language and profanity | Gratuitous obscenities |
The label in your report tells you which policy page to read.
Transparency and misleading content on WordPress sites
Two of these are the ones ordinary WordPress publishers most often run into.
Transparency asks for clear dates, bylines, information about authors, the publication and the company behind it, and non-generic contact details. Common gaps:
- Themes that hide the author and date on posts, or show "admin" as the byline.
- No About page, masthead or editorial policy page.
- A contact form with no organization name or address.
Fix the theme template so each article shows a real byline linked to an author page with a bio, plus published and updated dates. Hydrogen SEO's Article schema can carry author and date fields; see the Article schema and Person schema pages. Note that Hydrogen SEO sets author archives to noindex by default, which keeps them out of search results but leaves them visible to readers, which is what this policy cares about.
Misleading content is about Discover-style headlines and thumbnails promising something the article does not deliver. Rewrite headlines to match the story and audit how your Open Graph image and title represent each piece with the Open Graph preview.
Deceptive practices and disclosure
The deceptive practices types all turn on disclosure. Google's recommended actions ask you to clearly disclose financial or other meaningful relationships with governments and political interest groups, an accurate location for your organization, or the satirical nature of a site. Where disclosure would put someone at personal risk, Google asks for evidence of that risk instead.
For coordinated deceptive practices and the good neighbor policy, Google also suggests reviewing who has access to your analytics, content management and ecommerce systems, and deciding whether those parties should be named on your site as stakeholders. On WordPress, that means checking the administrator and editor list, any agencies with logins, and plugin accounts that can publish.
Building the evidence for review
Make the fixes first: remove or revise the violating content, then publish the structures that show things have changed. Useful evidence:
- A public editorial policy and corrections policy, with dates.
- A masthead naming editors and their responsibilities.
- Examples of articles reviewed under the new process.
- For disclosure types, the page where relationships or location are now stated.
Then select Request Review and link to each item. Google's wording, an editorial board "with a history of improved practices," suggests reviewers want some track record, not a policy page published the same afternoon. Reviews can take days to weeks, and the outcome arrives by email and as a status message in Search Console. Publishers in the news publishers section of this site will find more on article markup and news sitemaps.
Common questions
Does a News and Discover violation affect my regular Google rankings?
Google's help page frames these as violations of Google News and Discover content policies and does not describe an effect on ordinary web search results. Your eligibility for News and Discover is what the action addresses.
What does Google mean by an editorial board with a history of improved practices?
Google does not define it precisely. In practice it means showing named people responsible for editorial decisions and evidence that the new standards have been applied over time, not just announced.
Can a satirical site avoid the impersonation violation?
Google's recommended action for impersonation is to clearly disclose the satirical nature of the site, or to show that disclosing accurate identities would create a personal security risk.