Pure Spam – How To Fix It If You Are Tagged As One

If you have received an email from Google Webmaster stating that your website has been penalised for being 'pure spam', and you have no idea what it is, and how to handle it, you have come to the right place.

Let's start with the basics. In the past and recently, Google has rolled out many updates to implement algorithms that filter away spam, discourage 'black-hat' SEO practices and enable the search engine to deliver relevant and genuine search results. Now, to effectively handle the spam situation, Google Webmaster has tagged and penalised the websites that are linked to spam or indulge in spam creation. 'Pure spam' is a tag given by Google to websites that have implemented and performed the most outrageous spam activities.

According to Matt Cutts (head of the Webspam team at Google), Pure spam includes “auto generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping, throwaway sites, or throwaway domains, where someone is more or less doing churn and burn, where they are creating as many sites as possible to make as much money as possible before they get caught.”

Now that your website has been flagged as 'pure spam', the next immediate step is to fix the issue and request for a reconsideration by Google.

Fixing the issue:
• First of all, check the history of your website. Incase, you have bought a new website, do a thorough check on archive.org. This will help you in knowing the complete history of your website, and if there were any spam issues earlier.
• If the domain has some previous spam issues, there are high chances that these have triggered Google Webmaster penalty.
• To recover from this, ensure that whatever you now put up on your website is well under the guidelines of Google's updates. Avoid linking anything that lingers on the line of being a spam.
• With consistent efforts and non-spam actions within the site, you can build up the image in Google's eyes as a reliable website, and worth indexing.
• In the event that your website has been long in the network, and the 'pure spam' tag has been generated by the practices of your own, then the recovery takes a long and consistent effort.
• Before you start, carefully go through the details on Google Webmaster, and strictly adhere to the set guidelines.
• Make certain that every action, link, page that has contributed to the 'pure spam' tagging has been removed.
• Consider building your website from scratch rather than making elaborate changes on it. This way, you will be able to manage the website well, and adhere to the guidelines as well.
• Whether you build a new website or make changes on the existing one, it is crucial to document each and every clean up tasks implemented.

Follow these steps and file for a reconsideration for your website. If you religiously adhere to the guidelines provided to you by Google Webmaster, and aim at staying away form anything that even remotely falls into the category of spam, we are sure you will get rid of the 'pure spam' tag.