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In my experience, pure spam penalties are either super easy to clear or darn near impossible. The easy ones are ones where someone buys a new domain and doesn't realize that the previous owner of the site had used it for spam.  If this is the case then you can file for reconsideration, tell Google you are a new owner and they usually lift the penalty. But, if this isn't the case, then I'd be concerned. I've seen other internet marketing companies get pure spam penalties on their sites when Google feels that they are breaking the quality guidelines in several ways.  In my opinion it's like Google saying, "We don't want this site in our search engine results so we're going to call you pure spam and remove you from the index."  Usually pure spam is a mixture of bad backlinks, on site content that is not good for users and other things.  Your backlink profile looks very unnatural.  Every link I am seeing is anchored with a keyword like "atlanta web design" and "atlanta marketing". But, a pure spam penalty usually goes beyond the backlink profile.  I didn't spend a lot of time looking at your site but I've seen SEO companies get pure spam penalties when they are using techniques that are against the quality guidelines for their clients.  Or, in other cases, if the website is describing how to manipulate Google then this can invite a pure spam penalty. If you made the keyword anchored links then part of your recovery would involve removing as many as possible and disavowing the rest.  If you feel that they are negative SEO, then you still need to clean up what you can.  Google's generally good at not letting negative SEO happen, but if you feel that you are 100% innocent and did not build these links then explain what you can when you file for reconsideration.  Google is always interested in hearing about possible negative SEO. Only you know what kind of techniques you are offering to your clients.  If the methods that you use for ranking go outside of the quality guidelines then I am guessing that you will not get rid of the pure spam penalty without a complete change of your business practices.  (I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case, but I do know that Google doesn't treat pure spam penalties lightly.) Is the penalty related to the hacking of the other sites?  From what you have described I would guess no.

does moz cawel test tool is sufficient enough to crawl a whole site ?

Jack I will send you his email via private message.  Take a look there

Thanks for the suggestion, Dennis. It's been awhile since I last used Scrapebox. They published a nice video on youtube discussing how to check Google indexed using Scrapebox. I finished the index check task using the monitor backlinks software mentioned above previously. It was nice to see more link metrics other than yes/no, but Scrapebox would definitely do the job.

It's very common for responsive sites to reduce the content for mobile devices, without any penalty. This is not a deceptive or black/gray hat tactic, as long as you're not cloaking the text. In fact, you're just making a better UX. In my experience, the hover-state text will be indexed (as a link). You can see an example on my company's work page here - notice how the hover-state content reduces as the site responds to different devices. Also see how the hover-state text is showing (as links) in the cached version of the page. I hope this helps!

http://www.eteach.com/justindaviesnovemeber This template is more visually appealing. You will need to make sure there is content on the page to avoid looking like a catalog. I would make sure that the links aren't hidden in a jQuery, but are fully functional as in site links.

No problem!

Thank you for this one, i need to do some work on this myself. Will read through it.

Wow... Thank you very much for the replies and time taken to look at my problem. I will take all advice on board and as Shawn advised carry on following best practice. I am really happy to get some reassurance and second opinions on some of the spammy techniques they are using and  feel sure Google will catch up eventually Thank you, James

Doorway pages are pages set up with redirection, spoofing, or cloaking to get some SEO benefit that's usually short-term gains and typically not so kosher. Basically, the visitor thinks they're getting one thing and ends up with another. Landing pages are any webpages on your site which you're driving traffic to. Hope this helps!

Would totally agree here - looks and smells like one of those "well past their best before date" link machine models...so stay the hell outta their world!

Keri, Happy belated Thanksgiving! It's been about 3.5 months, so just wanted to give a quick update on this in case anyone else is still having this issue. Unfortunately, we haven't really seen a solution to this but have improved our situation. During the period of September 10-17, we contacted Perfect Audience to see if they were experiencing the same security issues as AdRoll. They confirmed that they too had seen some customers affected by this invalid traffic and so their engineers worked on modifying their tag to "no longer track IE7 traffic" and "blacklist all domains" that the traffic was coming from." Unfortunately, this had no positive effect on our client's traffic issues. Half-way through October, we saw invalid traffic spike once again into the thousands and stay there until around mid-November. Half-way through November, the client migrated to a secure site (HTTPs), which actually made a notable difference in the invalid traffic, causing it to reduce down to, what we might consider, normalized numbers. Although this seemed to help, unfortunately it still didn't completely address the problem. Today, we're still seeing IE7 as the top browser with 95% bounce rate. At this point, we're just left to run filters to exclude the IE7 traffic until this essentially resolves itself (crossing fingers).

Thanks for the response. I used MOZ open site explorer and Majestic and it showed the domain 10+ and page 25+ with backlinks. In Majestic, it showed the current backlinks, TF and CF which is why I got it. I'm wondering if adding SSL then redirecting to the new domain address will the link juice carry over?

Thanks Leonie, so I guess if CTR goes up, so must ranking eventually...

Hi and cheers for your response! I think there is 1 important point which everyone should notice. Using Alexa toolbar + visiting through it on your own sites and acting for getting low bounce rate and visiting several pages with long time spent on site. Google is looking on to those as a ranking factors.. Ps.. I am using Link Research Tools, SemRush, MOZ and Ahrefs as my main SEO tools, have been using them for years now. Sorry, not meant to advertise those, but just wanted to mention that i am using many tools at the moment.. And, quality ones.. Thanks,

They've messed up in general really. They should be blocking robots to what appears to be the CMS for their clients use as there are surely numerous effects on their clients (cannibalization caused by the duplication of pages, for instance). As Mike said they've not taken into account the SEO aspects of the way they've implemented their system.

More information

I get some of this type of traffic. It is coming from spammer sites.  These sites often look like a "directory" or they look like "search results".  They are usually running in industries where the cost of an adwords click is moderate to expensive.  They are always running ads - usually Adsense. I think that they operate in a few different ways... a) Dynamic site: you go there today and can't find a link.   That is because they are changing the data continuously - perhaps daily or by visitor.  The might think that changing the data on the site continuously will help it survive in the SERPs.    Look at this site today, then go back in a day or two, you will likely see that it is completely different,  sometimes it will "look" identical, but the destination of the links have changed. b) Referral log spammers:  there never was a link to you on their site.  They have a computer program sending a "visitor" to your site so that they appear in your referral log.  They are doing this in industries where people pay a lot of money for clicks and pay really close attention to their visitors.  They know that you will come looking.   They hope that you will click on their ads. c) Malware trap:  another referral log scheme to get staff from a high value business, maybe a competitor, to visit their site.  That referral in your log was "bait" and you are stepping into a malware trap. A small business in a high value niche is the most lucrative and vulnerable malware target.  Staff who are chasing reefers have access to adwords accounts, adsense accounts, checking accounts, credit card with high limits, they got your name, address and zip code. d) Adsense/Adword:  these sites display Adsense.  Yesterday a visitor, genuine or robotic, was on their site and "clicked" your ad.  That produced a visitor to your site and income for their site. e) Combinations of the above:   Two or three of the methods above are all being used. Be careful.

Thanks everybody! Nice list

That helps a lot. Thank you!