undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. Pure spam Manual Action by Google

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Pure spam Manual Action by Google

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
4
8
1.9k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • RuchiPardal
    RuchiPardal last edited by May 14, 2015, 10:54 AM

    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

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • MarieHaynes
      MarieHaynes @RuchiPardal last edited by May 14, 2015, 5:02 PM May 14, 2015, 5:02 PM

      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!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • DirkC
        DirkC last edited by May 14, 2015, 12:34 PM May 14, 2015, 12:34 PM

        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

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • RuchiPardal
          RuchiPardal @DirkC last edited by May 14, 2015, 12:02 PM May 14, 2015, 12:02 PM

          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

          MarieHaynes 1 Reply Last reply May 14, 2015, 5:02 PM Reply Quote 0
          • RuchiPardal
            RuchiPardal @PatrickDelehanty last edited by May 14, 2015, 11:50 AM May 14, 2015, 11:50 AM

            Thanks for your quick repose. Much appreciated.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • PatrickDelehanty
              PatrickDelehanty @DirkC last edited by May 14, 2015, 11:42 AM May 14, 2015, 11:42 AM

              ^ VERY nice, Dirk!

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • DirkC
                DirkC last edited by May 14, 2015, 11:36 AM May 14, 2015, 11:36 AM

                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 RuchiPardal 2 Replies Last reply May 14, 2015, 12:02 PM Reply Quote 4
                • PatrickDelehanty
                  PatrickDelehanty last edited by May 14, 2015, 11:27 AM May 14, 2015, 11:23 AM

                  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!

                  RuchiPardal 1 Reply Last reply May 14, 2015, 11:50 AM Reply Quote 2
                  • 1 / 1
                  1 out of 8
                  • First post
                    1/8
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • moon-boots

                    Google Pagination Changes

                    What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s). Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first. The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1. I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it? Is there anything I'm missing?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 24, 2019, 12:50 AM | moon-boots
                    0
                  • LindsayE

                    Can you index a Google doc?

                    We have updated and added completely new content to our state pages. Our old state content is sitting in a our Google drive. Can I make these public to get them indexed and provide a link back to our state pages? In theory it sounds like a great link building strategy... TIA!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 18, 2018, 8:56 AM | LindsayE
                    1
                  • alphonseha

                    Google not Indexing images on CDN.

                    My URL is: http://bit.ly/1H2TArH We have set up a CDN on our own domain: http://bit.ly/292GkZC  We have an image sitemap: http://bit.ly/29ca5s3 The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: http://bit.ly/29eNSXv. We used to have a disallow to /thumb/ which had a 301 redirect to our CDN but we removed both the disallow in the robots.txt as well as the 301. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. The above screenshot is from the GWT of our main domain.The GWT from the CDN subdomain just shows 0. We did not submit a sitemap to the verified subdomain property because we already have a sitemap submitted to the property on the main domain name. While making a search of images indexed from our CDN, nothing comes up: http://bit.ly/293ZbC1While checking the GWT of the CDN subdomain, I have been getting crawling errors, mainly 500 level errors. Not that many in comparison to the number of images and traffic that we get on our website. Google is crawling, but it seems like it just doesn't index the pictures!? Can anyone help? I have followed all the information that I was able to find on the web but yet, our images on the CDN still can't seem to get indexed.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 8, 2016, 10:35 AM | alphonseha
                    0
                  • Shawn_Huber

                    Prevent Google from crawling Ajax

                    With Google figuring out how to make Ajax and JS more searchable/indexable, I am curious on thoughts or techniques to prevent this. Here's my Situation, we have a page that we do not ever want to be indexed/crawled or other. Currently we have the nofollow/noindex command, but due to technical changes for our site the method in which this information is being implemented if it is ever displayed it will not have the ability to block the content from search. It is also the decision of the business to not list the file in robots.txt due to the sensitivity of the content. Basically, this content doesn't exist unless something super important happens, and even if something super important happens, we do not want Google to know of its existence. Since the Dev team is planning on using Ajax/JS to pull in this content if the business turns it on, the concern is that it will be on the homepage and Google could index it. So the questions that I was asked; if Google can/does index, how long would that piece of content potentially appear in the SERPs? Can we block Google from caring about and indexing this section of content on the homepage? Sorry for the vagueness of this question, it's very sensitive in nature and I am trying to avoid too many specifics. I am able to discuss this in a more private way if necessary. Thanks!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 1, 2015, 6:10 PM | Shawn_Huber
                    0
                  • bjs2010

                    Limit on Google Removal Tool?

                    I'm dealing with thousands of duplicate URL's caused by the CMS... So I am using some automation to get through them - What is the daily limit? weekly? monthly? Any ideas?? thanks, Ben

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 8, 2014, 6:24 PM | bjs2010
                    0
                  • KateV

                    Does Google hate wordpress?

                    I have my categories pages set to noindex, follow. I deactivated the author and date based archives, and all the /page/2 /page/3 are noindex. Is this the right approach? I had thought about adding some text to the topic of each category page and then changing them to index. I'm using showing recent post excerpts on the homepage. Another other suggestions? I think two of my sites are in panda for no good reason. It seems like non-wordpress blogs in my industry do better than comparable wordpress sites.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 2, 2013, 2:03 PM | KateV
                    0
                  • SEOSponge

                    Multiple Authors Google + Authorship

                    Hello, I took a look through past questions but can't seem to find a definitive answer on setting up Google + Authorship credit (for multiple authors) using a Wordpress blog. Has anyone had experience setting this up? Or could you recommend solid reading/research? I took a look at a couple of Wordpress plug in's but just found them very confusing (so did our IT contact who will ultimately be setting up code for this.) Any direction or advice is appreciated.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 11, 2013, 11:14 AM | SEOSponge
                    0
                  • CommercePundit

                    How to stop Google crawling after 301 redirect?

                    I have removed all pages from my old website and set 301 redirect to new website. But, I have verified old website with Google webmaster tools' HTML verification file which enable me to track all data and existence of pages in Google search for my old website. I was assumed that, Google will stop crawling and DE-indexed all pages after 301 redirect. Because, I have set 301 redirect before 3 months. Now, I'm able to see Google bot activity on my website with help of Google webmaster tools. You can find out attachment to know more about it. How can it possible & How Google can crawl removed pages? You can see following image to know more about it. First & Second

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 19, 2012, 12:40 PM | CommercePundit
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.