My site got penalized ( manual penalty)
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Your site is offline.
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Which is the URL, www.yourfashionmag.com or yourstylemag.com?
Was there any other information included with the notice? How long have you had this domain? Can you tell us a bit about the content and its source? Any link building you've done?
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Hello Lisa, Depending on the age and authority of your domain name I would seriously just consider starting fresh with a brand-new domain name. Even if the metrics on your domain name are half decent there is still no guarantee whatsoever that after you fix all of the problems you perceive to be wrong with your website that it will ever rank like it used to again.
Google never tell you exactly why they have penalised your site and you may find yourself playing an ongoing guessing game for the next six months before your site even has a chance of recovering. Even Google penalty Seo experts would have trouble getting a penalised site back to its original rankings in less than three months, and even that is still a gamble as it may not work at all no matter what you do.
You already have all of your site’s content and structure so I would just clone your old site onto a brand-new domain name and start from there. You could lay some solid Seo foundations in the next three months onto your new domain and at least you’d know for sure that the site will eventually have a chance of ranking. Working on sites to get their penalties removed is probably also much harder work then just trying to rank a brand-new site.
Of course there are so many different variables unique to your situation but my advice is to be very careful before you go down the penalty recovery road, as you have no idea where it will eventually lead, how long it will actually take, or whether it will even work on not.
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Google said "As a result of your site having pure spam". How would moving the exact same site to a new domain cure it having pure spam?
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Hi Keri, I suppose that depends on the exact definition of "As a result of your site having pure spam". Yes I definitely stand corrected if that statement from Google is aimed directly at the domains on-site content or internal anchor text heavy linking structure. It's hard not to automatically assume that it's your offsite links when it comes to penalty and spam warnings. (my one-way link building mind)
Yes my answer was directly aimed at inbound link spam and not on-site issues. And if that's the case that penalty should be quite easy to remove if the statement is completely associated with the sites on-site content etc. Just a couple of days of housekeeping and a resubmission could potentially have that site back to its former glory then.
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Pure spam penalties are either extremely easy to get rid of or extremely difficult. The easy ones are ones where you end up purchasing a domain that was previously used for spam. If this is the case, then just file for reconsideration telling them that you are the new owner and they'll lift the penalty.
But if that's not the case, then in most cases pure spam penalties can't be lifted without completely revamping the site. And I mean completely. Your site is currently offline. You'll need a good functioning site in order to file for reconsideration, so just removing it won't work.
It's hard to comment on why you got the pure spam penalty without being able to see the site, but one common reason is if you have a site that just reuses someone else's content.
If you get the site online again, respond and I'll take a look.
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Was there any other information included with the notice? How long have you had this domain? Can you tell us a bit about the content and its source? Any link building you've done?
In OSE, I don't see much in the way of links. Two of the links are from a blogspot site about loans, and the About Us block for that site states it is run by a specific company, and that specific company is also listed as the whois contact for the site you are asking about. That could be a problem (both the off-topic link and a link that Google may view as not editorially given).
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Ok, thanks for that. I have a few thoughts now.
How much of your content is unique content that can only be found on your site? Is it possible that all of your articles are ones that are just repurposed from other sites?
For example, take this page: http://www.yourstylemag.com/kamal-lawn-2015-launch-by-ayesha-farooq-hashwani/. Some of the images are watermarked as coming from other sites. If you are just taking other people's content and repurposing it, then this will not work. Even if the words are technically unique, unless you are adding something of SIGNIFICANT value, you are going against the quality guidelines.
Are you possibly using some type of translation software to take other people's articles and call them your own? For example, here is a paragraph from one of your articles. It looks like it has been auto-translated into English:
"After spring the fall season starts and the temperature moves into the quite hot. This is necessary for us to opt for starchy food in fall season 2015. This is fact that our diet or food play important role in our health. So the shift can be damaging for you if you will not do care of your food. Wrong food can help you to gain excess weight. Let’s come to your saving and we are sharing some useful eating tips for fall season 2015."
Do you have articles on your site that you yourself wrote that are original and not based on someone else's work?
(p.s. I'm not trying to be insulting...just trying to determine why Google is seeing the site as pure spam. My suspicions are that this site mostly contains info that is taken from elsewhere.)
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Hi Lisa,
In my opinion, in order to lift this pure spam penalty you will have to convince the webspam team that your articles are unique and that they are valuable enough for Google to include them in their search results.
If you say that you hired a writer and that the writer said the articles weren't copied, that's probably not going to be enough. Unfortunately, in the few minutes that I spent looking at the site, my conclusion was that I wouldn't want to spend time reading any of these articles because they are either written in broken English or they have a lot of words but aren't really saying much at all. (Again, I'm sorry that this sounds harsh, but I think that this is how the webspam team is seeing these articles.)
I think that there is a real problem with your images. You can use the Google image search by image function to check your images and you'll see that they are all copied from elsewhere. Now, if the images have a creative commons license on them, then that could be ok. But, if you're using other people's images without permission then this can be problematic.
Unfortunately I think that lifting this penalty will be difficult. You'd have to clean up all of the broken English on the site so that it doesn't look like it was just run through an auto-translator. Then, you'd need to find a way to show Google that you have a large number of really good and helpful articles that they would be happy to show to people who are searching for information. This may be tough.
Take for example, this article that is featured on your home page:
http://www.yourstylemag.com/telenor-fashion-weekend-2015/
I can't understand the wording at all. It is really not written well:
"Telenor is a best telecommunication service in Pakistan. Telenor organized and sponsored to fashion related events to advertise. In this 2015 year, Telenor Fashion Weekend took place in Lahore. This is true that this coming year brings a lot of things with new and moderating form."
But, even if you were able to clean up the English so that it is understandable, why would Google want to show this page in their search results? I Googled "Telenor Fashion Weekend 2015" and came up with 788,000 pages. Why would readers want to see your page? If you can convince the webspam team that you've got content worthy of including in their index then they will reinclude you.
But unfortunately the site really does look like one that is quickly set up just to generate views for ad revenue.
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How much of the content is actually yours and how much is copied from other places. Did you use spun articles? If the website an autoblog? Either way, i would say the penalty is correct and your website is spam (if you can't prove otherwise).