Over the last day or so, Google began issuing manual actions for “social engineering content detected.”  These new warnings have a pretty confusing name that are causing people to question what exactly “social engineered content” is.

Here is the new warning:

It seems to be related to Google’s new change to the Safe Browsing program.  They recently made it so sites with deceptive advertising – such as “download button ads” which are designed to confuse site visitors, would now be flagged as deceptive.

The name is definitely confusing, simply because a huge number of webmasters have no idea what “social engineering” is or what it means. I could see where someone might think it is related to something social media – such as social media share buttons.  The description is somewhat better to alerting webmasters to what the issue is.

If you run into this warning, you will need to have a close look at the advertising on your site.  With ad networks it can sometimes be hard to know whether one of them is serving a deceptive ad.  And there do seem to be either false positives, or issues were the deceptive ad is no longer displaying when submitting a reconsideration request.

Once you are sure the deceptive ads have been removed, you can go ahead and file a reconsideration request, which should be in your Google Search Console account under manual actions.