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
-
DIsavow links even without a penalty?
This is a sort of follow-on question from a previous one I asked, where I was being advised to do this. I've inherited a poor client link profile from a previous provider, with tons of partial match links for "IT support" on a lot of low quality directories. It has been at least a year now since they were built, and I'm concerned that the abundance of them will make it harder to rank for any "IT support" keywords due to over-optimization. This is frustrating since "IT support London" is the main keyword for the home page. On the previous thread, I was advised to disavow these old links and move on, though I have heard from many in the SEO community (and read) that using the disavow tool unless absolutely necessary (i.e. In the case of a penalty) is a mistake, since it is effectively notifying Google that you have been "misbehaving" and you should stay away from sending these types of signals altogether. Can anyone with experience in this matter please advise on this? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg1 -
Should I 301 this ecommerce site, or turn it into a blog?
Hey everyone, I have a couple of ecommerce sites - Site 1 (DA33) and Site 2 (DA24). They are in the same niche and have the same products, a relic of how our business started in 2007. But now we just want to manage one brand, Site 1. This is our question: Is it better to 301 Site 2 into Site 1 (page by page redirect), or would it be valuable to instead turn Site 2 into a blog site? Site 2 currently has some good relevant links to it that would be nice to 301 to Site 1, but the value of 301 redirects seems to have been steadily diminishing since roughly 2011. If we take Site 2 and turn it into a WordPress blog, develop some good industry-relevant content on it (and outsource/allow guest posts on it for relevant quality content as well), and sometimes we drop a link or two into the content to help promote Site 1 - would that be more valuable than a 301? Obviously, a lot more "work" goes into creating a content site than just 301'ing it over. I guess the question is: does a page-by-page 301 of a niche-identical and even product-identical site into another have more of a benefit for SEO than getting some content-relevant anchor text links on a blog site? What would you do in my position?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mozUser14692350692210 -
Rotating content = Google Penalty?
Hi all. We have an ecommerce site which features various product sections. In each section you might have 60 products each displayed neatly in pages of 10. We recently added functionality, so that if a product is out of stock, it will automatically drop that product to the back of the list and bring another in stock one forward. We're just worried that Google will view the same information, repeatedly rotating on the first page of 10 products (the page that ranks) and think we're in some way trying to trick Google into thinking the content is fresh? Does anyone have a throw on this? Is it likely to penalise us? Thank you!!! Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bnknowles10 -
Google penalty or what???
Hi, we have a blog site xxxxxxxxxxx.es, that yesterday dissapear from google ranks all of a sudden it only appears if you write xxxxxxxxx.es I have checked gogle webmaster tools and there are no manual actions, no messages. Also, we don't have much links pointing to this site. Webmaster tools show only 319 links. We don't understand what have happenned. Never see something similar. What do you think? Any help would be appreciated. How do you proceed in this cases? It doesn't seem to be a link problem. How do you know what kind of penalty do you have? Thank you. Update: Hi, the domain is www.crearcorreoelectronico.es I have check the majestic seo, ose, and wmt and get the links. We have some links that are not good, but are automatic ones, that some portals generate. Maybe is something related with the content. I don't know Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite1 -
Is it worth removing date from Blog Posts / Articles
Wondering, is it worth to remove date from articles from seo perspective. Am sure, Google search algorithm would like demote a post written a year back, as against an article on the same post (unless a year old post has very strong Authoritative links) May be it can turn out a bad user experience of removing dates, but if can hide date using Javascripts so as to show it as image to user and hide it from search engines, is it a good idea !!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
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 -
Canonical vs noindex for blog tags
Our blog started to user tags & I know this is bad for Panda, but our product team wants use them for user experience. Should we canonizalize these tags to the original blog URL or noindex them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Optimizing the HomePage of a WordPress blog
Dearest SEOmozzers, I am creating WordPress blogs and I would like to know from a WordPress expert how to better optimize the homepage of a site. In particular, I'd like to know how to create an SEO-friendly homepage that I want to optimize for certain keywords. Do you think that it is better to show on the homepage the posts that I write, which change constantly, or a static, well-optimized text that will include the keywords I want to rank for? I have been naively using the changing posts, but after an analysis of the competitors I have noticed that most of them use a static text and show only the most recent post at the bottom of the page. I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know the best practice to adopt to optimize the site. Thank you. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0