Hi, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the pure spam label and what it means if your website got that message in free webmaster console.

Pure spam is the label that we typically use for something that any sufficiently tech savvy person would recognize as spam.

So, for example, what you would traditionally call "black hat", you know, auto generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping, throwaway sites or throwaway domains where somebody's more or less doing churn and burn.

They wanna create as many sites as they can, their business wants to make as much money as they can before they get caught and they just wanna try and get as much money as they can, they're not worried about the consequences.

It can include repeated spam, egregious sort of stuff, these are the sort of things that we feel pretty confident that a regular person looking at the sort of stuff that we're taking action on would say, "Yeah, this is complete junk.

We don't want it showing up and polluting our search results.”

It's actually the vast majority of the sorts of sites that we actually take action on as a result.

So, um, when we take action, as far as pure spam or black hat, we're usually taking action on the entire site because it's relatively rare for a small part of the site to be black hat and the rest of it to be really, really good.

Often times it's on a free host, right, because the people who are doing churn and burn, they wanna make a lot of accounts and a free host, by definition, lets you host your content for free on a sub domain or on a sub directory and people just wanna throw that content up and try to make as much money as they can.

Now, we do take action on domains.

A lot of the times if people, you know, got a domain from somebody else, maybe they're throwing up spam on it at that point.

So, it's relatively rare for people to even try to do reconsideration requests on true black hat or pure spam sites because it's almost like the business model was spamming and so to try to come back from that is more of a difficult task because you have more to prove as far as showing good faith that you're not going to violate Google's webmaster guidelines; but it can happen.

So, for example, an example scenario might be, you bought a domain and without realizing it, the previous owner was doing a lot of
spam. So you might check and find out, "Oh, this site has a pure spam label. I didn't realize that but now I have to clean things up."

Well, you can look in archive.org or you can see what the previous history was, whatever it was you basically just wanna make sure that you clean that site up, that you try to remove whatever nasty content that there is whether it be stuff on the page, backlinks pointing to the page, whatever it is you try to give it, as much as possible, a clean slate.

When you do a reconsideration request, I would emphasize, "Okay, you know, I got this, I didn't realize that I got it.

It's changed ownership" or basically trying to show the reasons why we should trust this site again given that, you know, based on the past record or based on the content that was on the site before, the site really doesn't look like it should be trustworthy.

So typically this is the sort of thing people would think of as typical web spam, you know, it's low quality, often auto generated, it looks like complete junk if you're sufficiently tech savvy to recognize it. If you are doing a reconsideration request it can be a more difficult task but you basically wanna prove, "Look, we're trying to turn over a new leaf, you know, we're leaving all that previous behavior behind and we're trying to make sure things are as clean as possible."

So, if that's what you're trying to do I wish you luck and make sure that you document it well whenever you do a reconsideration request just so that we can really kind of assess whether the site has really turned a corner or not.

Hope that helps.