What is Pure Spam?
Pure spam is a severe manual action penalty that Google issues against sites that employ aggressive black hat SEO techniques. Sites that receive one typically experience a significant drop in rankings or complete removal from search results pages.
Google only issues a pure spam manual action penalty after a human reviewer checks your site and determines you used deceptive and manipulative content creation and link building techniques aggressively and at scale.
De black hat SEO techniques that could earn you a pure spam penalty include:
- Verhulling
- Betaalde koppelingen
- Link schemes
- Scraped content
- Zoekwoord vulling
- Aggressive link exchanges
- Private blog networks (PBN)
Google is usually on the lookout for sites that use spammy practices, including pure spam. It even frequently releases algorithmic spam updates specifically to identify and penalize these sites. Multiple sites even received the pure spam manual action penalty after Google released the March 2024 Spam Update.
Why Google Issues a Pure Spam Penalty
Google specifically issues pure spam penalties on sites that employ black hat SEO techniques at scale. The owners of these sites typically have no intent of using white hat SEO techniques and are committed to manipulating the search results pages.
In most cases, their intent is to earn as much revenue as possible from the site before they are caught. Once caught, they rarely clean up the site or submit a reconsideration request and will abandon it instead.
However, innocent bloggers may receive a pure spam penalty when they purchase a domain name previously penalized for pure spam. In this case, Google recommends cleaning up the site and filing a reconsideration request.
You should ensure to inform Google that you are not the domain’s previous owner and only discovered it had a pure spam manual actions penalty after purchasing it. Alternatively, you can check a domain’s history before purchasing it. That way, you can be sure the previous owner did not use it for spam.
Importance of the Pure Spam Penalty
Pure spam is not important to your site. If anything, a pure spam penalty is bad news, considering Google only issues it when it determines that the site solely exists for spammy purposes. Google believes such spammers are only interested in earning as much money and traffic from the site as possible before they are caught.
Unlike other manual action penalties, bloggers issued a pure spam penalty are unlikely to file a reconsideration request since they usually have no intent to employ white hat SEO techniques. If the blogger had not used aggressive spam techniques, Google would have issued them some other manual action penalty.
For instance, a site might receive a “Thin Content with Little or No Added Value” penalty if it uses thin affiliate pages, doorway pages, or scraped content. However, if Google determines the violations are aggressive, automated, or executed at a large scale, it may escalate the penalty to “Pure Spam.”
For example, a site with 50 poorly written affiliate pages could receive a thin content penalty, while one with 10,000 auto-generated pages stuffed with gibberish keywords can receive a pure spam penalty.
Overall, the pure spam manual action is one of the most severe penalties Google can impose on a site. Unlike lesser manual actions (such as thin content or unnatural links), a pure spam penalty indicates blatant violations of Google’s guidelines.
It will devastate a site’s rankings and will likely result in it being removed entirely from the search results pages. The penalty is also typically applied to the entire site rather than specific pages or directories on the site.
How to Identify a Pure Spam Penalty
Sites that receive a pure spam manual actions penalty will receive the details of the penalty in their manual action report in Google Search Console. Google will also send them a notification in the Search Console message center and may send them an email.
To find this notification, head to the Google Search Console account connected to the site and click the message center at the top-right area of your dashboard.
Optionally, click on Security & Manual Actions.
Then, click Manual Actions. Google will show you any manual action penalty on your site.
Google may also email you to notify you of the pure spam penalty. However, this is not always the case, so you should monitor your traffic with Rank Math-analyse and check your Google Search Console message center and manual actions area whenever you notice a suspicious drop in your traffic.
How to Resolve a Pure Spam Manual Actions Penalty
Google will usually provide you with a general reason why you received a manual action penalty. For example, you can receive a message like “Your site appears to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, or scraping.”
This will give you an idea of the issue. However, Google will not provide the specifics since it wants to prevent spammers from manipulating its system.
So, review your content and remove the affected content and links from your site. If you do not want to delete the content, make sure to edit it so well that it becomes valuable and unique and complies with Google Search Essential’s guidelines.
Once done, file a reconsideration request with Google. Inform them of the changes you effected on your site and show them examples of the content you removed and the improved version. Make sure to execute the changes across your entire site and not just the specified content.