Manual action recovery

Pure Spam and Major Spam Problems - Manual Action Recovery

This is the most serious manual action Google issues and it usually means your whole site has disappeared from search, so we establish exactly what Google objected to, fix it properly and put the case for reinstatement.

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Pure spam / Major spam problems illustration

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Google’s Manual Actions report ↗

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Manual actions

Major spam problems (issued as "Pure spam" on older notices)

WHAT IS A PURE SPAM MANUAL ACTION?

Pure spam, which Google's Manual actions report now lists as Major spam problems, is the manual action reserved for sites that a reviewer believes are using aggressive spam techniques such as scaled content abuse, cloaking and other repeated or egregious violations of the spam policies. It's the one where Google isn't objecting to a part of what you've done, it's objecting to the site as a whole, and so the usual outcome is that every page is removed from the index and a site: search for your domain returns nothing at all.

WHAT DOES IT DO TO YOUR SITE?

In most cases the action affects all pages, which means organic traffic drops to zero more or less overnight and stays there, AND because the site is no longer in the index you can't rank for your own brand name, which is usually the point at which the phone calls from customers start. Unlike a link penalty where you can still limp along on reduced rankings, there is nothing left to limp along on, so every week it stays in place is a week with no organic revenue whatsoever.

Scope: Affected sections or whole property
Typical clean-up time: Estimated after diagnosis
Review time: Several days or weeks

WHY DID GOOGLE ISSUE IT?

Large numbers of pages were generated at scale with AI or other automation primarily to rank for keywords and without adding anything of value for the person reading them, which is what Google calls scaled content abuse

The site was built on an expired domain and filled with content unrelated to what the domain used to be about, in order to trade on its old reputation

Content has been scraped or copied from other websites and republished with little or no change

The site is cloaking, i.e. showing Googlebot one thing and real visitors another, or redirecting visitors somewhere they didn't expect to go

Several lesser violations have built up over time, or the site has been actioned before and the same behaviour has come back

HOW DO WE FIX IT?

We go through the site, its history in the Wayback Machine and its Search Console data to establish what a reviewer would have seen and which of the spam policies it falls under, because you can't write an honest reconsideration request until you know what you're owning up to
Sitewide spam inventory
Evidence log · Pure spam / Major spam problems
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We audit every indexable URL and sort the content into keep, rewrite and remove, and we're straight with you about how much of the site falls into the last two groups
Source and ownership review
Evidence log · Pure spam / Major spam problems
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We remove or noindex the content that can't be saved and work with you on rebuilding the pages worth keeping so that they are original and useful
Removal or rewrite plan
Evidence log · Pure spam / Major spam problems
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We check for and strip out any cloaking, sneaky redirects, doorway pages, hidden text and so on that are sitting alongside the content problem
Post-clean-up crawl
Evidence log · Pure spam / Major spam problems
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We write a full reconsideration request with examples of what was removed and what was added, and we stay with you through Google's review
Submission record
Evidence log · Pure spam / Major spam problems
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date

WHAT GOES INTO THE RECONSIDERATION REQUEST?

Of all the manual actions this is the one where a thin or defensive request gets rejected fastest, so the request we write is open about what the site was doing, specific about the number of URLs removed and rebuilt, and backed with examples the reviewer can click on. If you bought the site recently and the spam pre-dates you, Google asks you to say so in the request and confirm it now complies, and we set that out with the evidence of the change of ownership.

Reconsideration request service →

Questions about recovery

Can a site come back from a pure spam manual action?

Yes it can, as long as the thing Google objected to is actually removed and not just disguised, however we will tell you honestly after the diagnostic if we think the amount of rebuilding needed makes starting again on a clean domain the more sensible option.

I used AI to write my content, is that why?

Google's policy is aimed at content produced at scale to manipulate rankings with little value to users, however it was made, so a site with thousands of near-identical AI pages is at risk and a site that uses AI as part of producing useful, original pages generally isn't.

How long does recovery take?

Your diagnostic will include a clean-up estimate, and Google’s review usually takes several days or weeks, with link reviews sometimes taking longer.

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