Pure Spam

What is Pure Spam?

Pure spam is a manual action penalty Google issues against sites engaged in aggressive black hat SEO techniques that go against its spam policies. These include aggressive spam tactics like cloaking, keyword stuffing, and scraping. Sites issued a manual action penalty are typically deindexed and removed from search results. 

Google only issues a pure spam penalty after a human reviewer has reviewed your site and determined you are engaged in actions considered pure spam. In this case, you will see a notification in the manual action report and the Search Console message center. 

Google specifically issues pure spam penalties on sites owned by site owners looking to make as much money as possible before being caught. These site owners rarely submit a reconsideration request and will typically abandon the site when the penalty is issued. 

However, innocent site owners may receive a pure spam notification when they purchase a domain name previously penalized for pure spam. In this case, Google recommends cleaning up the site and informing them through a reconsideration request. Google also recommends checking out a domain’s history before purchasing. That way, you will be sure the previous owner did not use it for spam.