So you have a spam issue with your web site and your web site doesn't rank well in Google. What do you do first? Google's John Mueller said on Twitter first thing to tackle is to make sure your site has high quality content and then you should focus on web spam issues your site may have.
What John Mueller means is that if you have some sort of manual action, don't jump to just fix the specific issue but step back, look at your site as a whole and make your whole site better. Don't fix the single problem here or there because ultimately it probably won't have as much of an impact as making your whole site better.
Here is the tweet:
@gelostics I'd create a high quality website as a first priority, then worry about webspam reconsideration requests.
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) July 24, 2016
The specific issue this webmaster has is a sneaky mobile redirect manual action, but the webmaster fixed it and still has issues ranking. John said he should focus on building high quality content first and then worry about the web spam issues.
Forum discussion at Twitter.