Pure spam Manual Action by Google

[RuchiPardal]

Hello Everyone,

We have a website http://www.webstarttoday.com. Recently, we have received manual action from Google says "Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines." . Google has given an example http://smoothblog.webstarttoday.com/. The nature of the business of http://www.webstarttoday.com is to creating sub-domains (website builder). Anyone can register and create sub-domains.

My questions are:

• What are the best practices in case if someone is creating sub-domain for webstarttoday.com?
• How can I revoke my website from this penalty?
• What should i do with other hundreds of sub-domains those are already created by third party like http://smoothblog.webstarttoday.com? .
• Why these type of issues don't come with WordPress or weebly. ?

Regards,

Ruchi

[MarieHaynes]

That's great news that you got the penalty revoked.

It can often take a few days for the manual spam actions viewer to show that there is no longer a penalty.  Also, keep an eye on the manual spam actions viewer.  I've seen a number of sites lately that got a pure spam penalty revoked and then a few days or weeks later got either a thin content penalty or an unnatural links penalty.  Hopefully that's not the case for you though!

[DirkC]

It could be that the message is only disappearing tomorrow.

The message from Google however doesn't say that the penalty is revoked but that it has been revoked or adjusted. It's possible that the penalty is now only applied to the specific subdomain rather than the site as a whole. Is it still the original message which is shown under Manual actions?

Would update the terms & conditions anyway - so that you can react quick if you see other actions appearing. Try to scan the subdomains from time to time to make sure that they are not violating the Google guidelines.

Regards,

Dirk

[RuchiPardal]

Thanks Dirk,

You have nicely give all answers of my questions. I will take care of your points while creating the sub-domains. Also, I received this message from Google after filing the reconsideration request:

---

Dear Webmaster of http://www.webstarttoday.com/
We have processed the reconsideration request from a site owner for http://www.webstarttoday.com/. The site has been reviewed for violations of our quality guidelines. Any manual spam actions applied to the site have been revoked or adjusted where appropriate.

---

As per the message my website should had revoked from the penalty but the penalty is still showing, under "Manual action".

Thanks,

Ruchi

[RuchiPardal]

Thanks for your quick repose. Much appreciated.

[PatrickDelehanty]

^ VERY nice, Dirk!

[DirkC]

Hi,

Try to answer your questions point by point:

1. You could add to your terms & conditions that sites created need to follow Google webmasterguidelines - and if they are not followed you can delete the subdomain.

2. Revoke the penalty is only possible by cleaning the site and removing the contested content. It depends on your current terms & conditions if you have the possibility to force the one who is managing this blog to clean the site.

3. Idem as above - if your terms & conditions didn't stipulate that messing with Google guidelines is forbidden, there is not much you can do at this point.

4. Wordpress is hosting the blogs on wordpress.com - the main site is wordpress.org. Weebly has terms & conditions that forbid Spam/SEO sites (probably Wordpress.com has this as well - but it's stated very clearly on the Weebly.com)

Update terms & conditions if necessary - send warning to offending blog users & delete them if necessary.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

1. Here are a couple of resources: Moz and HotDesign 2. Pure Spam: What Are Google Penalties & What to Do to Recover from Search Engine Watch and this Q+A thread from Moz
3. I would go through your subdomains - find the ones that are blatant spam or thin with content and remove them. I would then make sure that they are blocked in your robots.txt.
4. I would say because Wordpress is the top used CMS in the world and a lot of reputable websites use it.

I would really work on the spam features for your product - looking for IPs that continually create websites, thin content, cloaking, off topic websites, link farms, etc. It's your duty as a CMS to watch how your users use the product. Not only will it keep your product's reputation clean, it will also show that you are taking steps to run a product with integrity.

Hope this all helps - good luck!