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Hello,
we received a manual action (partial match) for pure spam for a site of ours. The date is not sure, because we didn't receive any notification in mail or inside Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, so all we can say for sure is that we noticed that the manual action page wasn't empty anymore in 10/03/2013. Some context: our Google traffic got a big hit on 07/20/2013, losing around 60% out of 250k visits per day. At first we thought it was an algorithmic penalisation related to Panda update. It already happened a few times in the past: losing part of Google traffic and having it back usually a couple of months after, often even better than before. We were really surprised at first to be deemed as pure spam given that the domain is ours since it was created 7 years ago, that we have never employed black hat techniques and that our efforts were always put into building valuable pages for users instead of using spam techniques to deceive them. But after noticing the manual action, we obviously thought that this was the actual reason for our traffic sudden drop. So we tried to figure out from the 4 URLs that Google reported as examples of the pure spam affected pages, what issues on our site could have been misinterpreted for pure spam. We also checked all the webmaster guidelines and fixed the issues we thought we could not be fully compliant with. All this process lasted for 3 months, after which we submitted our reconsideration request on 12/16/2013.
On 01/07/2013 we got the following answer: We've reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that would directly affect your site's ranking in Google's search results. You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view actions currently applied to your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking. Google determines the order of search results using a series of computer programs known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking will happen from time to time as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or if it's performing more poorly than it once did, check out our Help Center to identify and fix potential causes of the problem. Now we are really puzzled because Google is saying 2 opposite things: We still have a pure spam manual action, and we don't have a manual action (as per their newest response to our reconsideration request).
We could find online a few cases somehow similar to our own, with Google apparently giving contradictory communications about manual actions, but none of them helped to build a clear explanation. I don't want to enter into the merits of the reasons of the penalisation or whether it was or wasn't deserved, but rather knowing if anyone had the same experience or has any guess on what happened.
What we could think of is some bug or problem related to synching between different pieces of Google but still, after some days, the manual action notice is always there on Google Webmaster Tools and nothing changed in our traffic. We are now thinking about sending a second reconsideration request asking to update our Google Webmaster Tools manual actions page accordingly to our current actual status.
What do you think? thank you very much

Hi, we are launching a new site called Gifly.com, it's all about Gifs. At the moment, our robots.txt is blocking everything because we want to have a solid url structure before going public. There is only one kind of page, the permalink which has this form: http://gifly.com/QPmf/ (the four characters 'QPmf' are completely random) What we made different from the multitude of other Gifs site is that we are
trying to categorize gifs with hashtags, so we introduced these kind of urls: http://gifly.com/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#fail
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#blonde
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#dumb This was done for several reason, the first is that each gif can have up to 10
hashtags. Another approach to this could have been: http://gifly.com/fail/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/blonde/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/dumb/FoYi/ ...but we will face tons of duplicated contents for search engines because the same gif
would have 10x permalinks this way. The way we use to navigate between hashtags is via buttons/ajax (see the list of hashtags on the left)
We know that google may have a hard time understanding the site's structure, We'd like to know if the current set of urls, as: http://gifly.com/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#fail
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#blonde
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#dumb could be okay if we provide google a solid sitemap. We are thinking about a first sitemap with the list of hashtags,
each hashtag points to a second sitemap containing the list of new gifs uploaded for said hashtag. Thanks! gifly_logo_r_a.gif

Hello, I just found that some of the urls on my  site have both ugly characters and some other things I'd like to fix (such as ---- into a single - ) After some local tests i've seen that If i leave some imperfections there will be 48k different urls  on the other hand if the renaming procedure is strict i'll have around 260k out of 2.3M urls to be renamed. If I'm going to do this I'll create new canonicals meta tag and redirect old urls with 301 headers  to the new location. The content will not change. My big doubt is SEO wise, I know that I'll have better urls, but aren't those too much redirects on a single day? what would you do if you wish to have shipshape urls and know some of these are crap? thanks