How to handle a pure spam penalty (from GWT) as a blogging platform
-
Hello,
I have a blogging platform which spammers unfortunately used a few years ago to create spam blogs. Since them, we've added spam filters and even if I can't not assume there isn't any spam blog left, I can say that most of the blogs are clean.
The problem is, in Google Webmasters Tools, we have a Pure spam message in the Manual actions page. (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604777?hl=en), with a list of 1000 blog links.
All these blogs have been marked as spam in our system for at least 1 year, technically it means they return a 410 header and display something like "this blog doesn't meet our quality requirements".
When I've first seen the manual action message in GWT, I have asked for reconsideration request. Google answered within a week saying that they had checked again our website, but when I go went to the manual actions page, there was still a "pure spam" message, with a different list of blogs, which have already been marked as spam for a year at least.
What should I do ? Ask for reconsideration requests as long as Google answers ?
Thank you in advance,
-
Hi Imran,
Instead of adding to this thread, I think it would be better to start a new question about how to check a site regarding duplicate content. Thanks!
-
Hello Marie, their URL still exist but the spam content isn't displayed.
Here is what happens when you go on a blog flagged as spam :
- Header 410
- 301 redirect to a page best practices which explains why this blog has been disabled
- this page is in the robots.txt as disallow, noindex, nofollow, with no link to the original website
Is this good ?
Thanks
-
These blogs are marked as spam but do they still exist at all? I mean, if you type in the url are the pages live? If so, they're still passing pagerank. Is there a way to completely remove the pages? Somehow Google is still seeing them.
-
404s. Remove them from existence.
Why will you have content that is pure spam on the site? if it is spam, delete it.
-
Throw that spam in the 410 can. It let's the crawlers know it's gone 'for good'.
-
Hello Federico,
Thank you for your quick reply.
When you say "Clean ALL the blogs, remove any trace of spam" :
- what is the best way to do : 410 or 404 ?
- if a spam blog has a meta noindex tag, will Google still considerer it ?
I will keep you updated with the future events.
-
Steps you should followÑ
- Clean ALL the blogs, remove any trace of spam (document everything in the process)
- Go back to the first point and make sure you have NO SPAM left (again, if anything comes up, document the changes you make)
- Once you are completely certain that there's no spam left, you can send another reconsideration request, make sure you show them the work you have done to clean the site.
- Wait for their response, and if you still get a negatory, repeat the process as most likely you still have spam in your site.
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Spam Score and You
Hey everybody! Looking for a few opinions on this. I am working with a site that has some backlinks with extremely high spam scores, all the way up to 86%. I have ran these through screaming frog and A LOT of them are 404's, or even 301. So obviously if they are 404's then I don't need to worry about them as much. They will sort themselves out. But what about all these other ones with a 25% and higher spam score? A lot of them also do not have SSL and are obv insecure. I would presume google doesn't like backlinks from sites that are not secure. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler1 -
How should I handle conflict between custom taxonomy and categories in a directory site?
Hello! I posted about this a week ago but haven't solidly figured it out yet. I'm building a website that is a directory of local therapists. I have categories for my blog and custom taxonomy to classify therapists. My problem is that my categories and my custom taxonomy overlap by necessity. For example I have the category "anxiety therapy" and the custom taxonomy "anxiety". Will this confuse google?...Do you think google will be able to figure out the differences between my blog archives and my therapist listing archives?...even though their names are similar and in a couple of cases the same? should I noindex my categories because the point of my site is to get customers to the directory....not the blog?.....even though the blog has lots of useful content? I should note here that I have my custom taxonomy pages set up so that they will display the 6 most recent blog posts in the corresponding category at the bottom of the page....so maybe that makes noindexing the categories more ok? Thank you for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
How do you handle a site with inherited negative links, but no penalty?
I'm trying to rank a new client for various key phrases that contain "it support." The problem is that about 100 of their 180 total referring domains have links that include "it support" (usually as partial match, or if exact then for uninteresting terms with low traffic), mostly on quite low quality directories. So, no penalty, and not much exact match I'm worried about, but I'm concerned that there's too high a percentage overall of partial match or simpy "it support"-based links for me to continue building keyword-optimized links to try and rank for the much harder terms we need to rank for... Despite the large number of low quality directories, a disavowal does not seem like a good idea since there is no penalty, but how does one avoid being handicapped by such bad links that came before one's time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
New domain or wait - Anchor Text Penalty
Hi We are confident we have an anchor text penalty and have removed nearly all offending links about 3 months ago, and since have only engaged on 100% natural linking with good content and simply asking people to share our site. However we have made no progress all in terms on position for our main keyword - we now thinking of starting a fresh on a new domain as Google doesn't seem to be able to forgive us... Any ideas please?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Sites with dynamic content - GWT redirects and deletions
We have a site that has extremely dynamic content. Every day they publish around 15 news flashes, each of which is setup as a distinct page with around 500 words. File structure is bluewidget.com/news/long-news-article-name. No timestamp in URL. After a year, that's a lot of news flashes. The database was getting inefficient (it's managed by a ColdFusion CMS) so we started automatically physically deleting news flashes from the database, which sped things up. The problem is that Google Webmaster Tools is detecting the freshly deleted pages and reporting large numbers of 404 pages. There are so many 404s that it's hard to see the non-news 404s, and I understand it would be a negative quality indicator to Google having that many missing pages. We were toying with setting up redirects, but the volume of redirects would be so large that it would slow the site down again to load a large htaccess file for each page. Because there isn't a datestamp in the URL we couldn't create a mask in the htaccess file automatically redirecting all bluewidget.com/news/yymm* to bluewidget.com/news These long tail pages do send traffic, but for speed we only want to keep the last month of news flashes at the most. What would you do to avoid Google thinking its a poorly maintained site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozgeekmum0 -
How to handle link building to product pages that change regularly?
How do I handle building links to an eCommerce site where the product pages change regularly because product is only available for a certain time frame? Should I focus on building links to the category pages instead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750 -
Dropped ranking - Penguin penalty or duplicate content issue?
Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action. I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings. If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index? The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update. The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text. As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update. One last question: The page completely dropped from the search index. If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position? If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gametv0 -
Is blogging enough to keep my site fresh?
I know that one of the things Google looks for is fresh content. My main site is a wordpress site where I have optimized about 12 static pags and I also do blog posts. Assuming I continue to blog, do I need to give my pages a periodic "face lift" or is enough just to keep blogging and add a static page from time to time? Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes0