Why My Website Hit for Manual Action for Pure Spam

[jasonprice]

This post is deleted!

[GPainter]

Did you double check your content  with Google from a quick look seems your content is not as unique as you seem to think. Also as you mentioned if sites been hacked you may find loads of links or pages that shouldn't be there so make sure you check for those too.

[yourweb]

While you are at it you should look at your anchor text.  A 10 second review in OSE looks like you might have overdone it for a few keywords.  Seems to be lots of site-wide anchors...

[MarieHaynes]

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.