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
-
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
-
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!
-
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The message from Google however doesn't say that the penalty is revoked but that it has been revoked or adjusted.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
-
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
-
Thanks for your quick repose. Much appreciated.
-
^ VERY nice, Dirk!
-
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
-
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!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
How does Google handle fractions in titles?
Which is better practice, using 1/2" or ½"? The keyword research suggests people search for "1 2" with the space being the "/". How does Google handle fractions? Would ½ be the same as 1/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice2 -
Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites
Long story but now i have a few links from my site 301 redirecting to youtube videos or eCommerce stores. They carry a considerable amount of traffic that i benefit from so i can't take them down, and that traffic is people from other websites, so basically i have backlinks from places that i don't own, to my redirect urls (Ex. http://example.com/redirect) My problem is that google is indexing them and doesn't let them go, i have tried blocking that url from robots.txt but google is still indexing it uncrawled, i have also tried allowing google to crawl it and adding noindex from robots.txt, i have tried removing it from GWT but it pops back again after a few days. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
Changed all external links to 'NoFollow' to fix manual action penalty. How do we get back?
I have a blog that received a Webmaster Tools message about a guidelines violation because of "unnatural outbound links" back in August. We added a plugin to make all external links 'NoFollow' links and Google removed the penalty fairly quickly. My question, how do we start changing links to 'follow' again? Or at least being able to add 'follow' links in posts going forward? I'm confused by the penalty because the blog has literally never done anything SEO-related, they have done everything via social and email. I only started working with them recently to help with their organic presence. We don't want them to hurt themselves at all, but 'follow' links are more NATURAL than having everything as 'NoFollow' links, and it helps with their own SEO by having clean external 'follow' links. Not sure if there is a perfect answer to this question because it is Google we're dealing with here, but I'm hoping someone else has some tips that I may not have thought about. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagJeff0 -
Wrong country sites being shown in google
Hi, I am having some issues with country targeting of our sites. Just to give a brief background of our setup and web domains We use magento and have 7 connected ecommerce sites on that magento installation 1.www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK) - main site 2. www.tidy-books.com (US) - variations in copy but basically a duplicate of UK 3.www.tidy-books.it (Italy) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 4.www.tidy-books.fr (France) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 5.www.tidy-books.de (Germany) - fully translated by a native speaker - uits' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 6.www.tidy-books.com.au (Australia) - duplicate of UK 7.www.tidy-books.eu (rest of Europe) - duplicate of UK I’ve added the country and language href tags to all sites. We use cross domain canonical URLS I’ve targeted in the international targeting in Google webmaster the correct country where appropriate So we are getting number issues which are driving me crazy trying to work out why The major one is for example If you search with an Italian IP in google.it for our brand name Tidy Books the .com site is shown first then .co.uk and then all other sites followed on page 3 the correct site www.tidy-books.it The Italian site is most extreme example but the French and German site still appear below the .com site. This surely shouldn’t be the case? Again this problem happens with the co.uk and .com sites with when searching google.co.uk for our keywords the .com often comes up before the .co.uk so it seems we have are sites competing against each other which again can’t be right or good. The next problem lies in the errors we are getting on google webmaster on all sites is having no return tags in the international targeting section. Any advice or help would be very much appreciated. I’ve added some screen shots to help illustrate and happy to provide extra details. Thanks UK%20hreflang%20errors.png de%20search.png fr%20search.png it%20search.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tidybooks1 -
How to NOT appear in Google results in other countries?
I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries? The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Page position dropped on Google
Hey Guys, My web designer has recommended this forum to use, the reason being: my google position has been dropped from page 1 to page 10 in the last week. The site is weloveschoolsigns.co.uk, but our main business site is textstyles.co.uk the school signs are a product of text styles. I have been told off my SEO company, that because I have changed the school logo to the text styles logo, Google have penalised me for it, and dropped us from page 1 for numerous keywords, to page 10 or more. They have also said that duplicate content within the school site http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/school-signs-made-easy/ has also a contributed to the drop in positions. (this content is not on the textstyles site) Lastly they said, that having the same telephone number is a definate no no. They said that I have been penalised, because google see the above as trying to monopolise on the market. I don’t know if all this is true, as the SEO is way above my head, but they have quoted me £1250 to repair all the errors, when the site only cost £750. They have also mentioned that because of the above changes, the main text styles site will also be punished. Any thoughts on this matter would be much appreciated as I don't know whether to pay them to crack on, or accept the new positions. Either way I'm very confused. Thanks Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TextStylesUK0 -
How does google recognize original content?
Well, we wrote our own product descriptions for 99% of the products we have. They are all descriptive, has at least 4 bullet points to show best features of the product without reading the all description. So instead using a manufacturer description, we spent $$$$ and worked with a copywriter and still doing the same thing whenever we add a new product to the website. However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too. I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content. I am asking it because we are a relatively new ecommerce store (online since feb 1st) while we didn't have a lot of organic traffic in the past, i see that our organic traffic dropped like 50% in April, seems like it was effected latest google update. Since we never bought a link or did black hat link building. Actually we didn't do any link building activity until last month. So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings? I see that our organic traffic is improving very very slowly since then but basically it is like between 5%-10% of our current daily traffic. What do you guys think? You think all our original content effort is going to trash?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serkie1 -
Check Google ban on domainname
Hello all, If I wanted to know if a domainname has a google ban on it would the following be a good idea to test it. Place an article on the domain page with unique content and then link to the page so its gets indexed and then link to the article from a well indexed page. If it doesn't get indexed there might be a ban on the page, if it does get indexed there is no ban on the page... Or are there other points I should keep in mind while doing this. All help is very welcome. Cheers, Arnout
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellemans0