John Mueller from Google posted a short, less than two minute video, for the #AskGoogleWebmasters series on YouTube around dealing with webspam manual actions from Google. In short he said if you are not sure what to do with a webspam manual action, then go to the forums.
When you go to the forums make sure to be honest, detailed and explain everything without hiding stuff from those you are asking for help from. Then when you get the advice, do not take it personally, it might be harsh but that is okay.
After you take in the feedback, make the necessary changes to your site and submit a reconsideration request. Those requests should be honest, truthful and straight to the point. John said you can even include a link to the forum thread where you asked for help.
Here is the video:
Here is the transcript:
Today, Elma is asking about her website that was flagged as spam and is unsure how to fix it.Well, if you're uncertain about a web spam manual action on your website I strongly recommend going to our webmaster help forums to get input from peers in the forums. You'll find folks who have seen lots and lots of sites with issues that resulted in web spam manual actions and you'll get input on things that you can either improve or fix on your website.
When you go there make sure to include all of the information you have about your website. Explain the original issue and what you've done since then to clean up. I recommend not trying to hide anything about your website, everyone makes mistakes at some point that's fine. The important part is that it's a lot easier for folks to help if you're honest about what has happened so far.
Sometimes the input you'll get isn't easy to take in especially if you've spent a lot of time just focusing on that one website but regardless I find it's always useful to get external opinions from folks who have seen a lot of different websites.
Once you've made significant changes to clean things up go ahead and file a reconsideration request. Detail the changes that you've made perhaps even link to the forum thread for more context. These reconsideration requests are reviewed by the web spam team manually. So be clear about what you submit without overloading it with unnecessary details.
Nothing really new but nice how John jammed this into less than two-minutes.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
