Manual action recovery

User-Generated Spam - Manual Action Recovery

Spammers have been using your forums, comments or user profiles to promote their own sites and Google has taken action on the pages involved, so we clear it out, stop it coming back and get the action reviewed.

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Is this the message in your Search Console?

Google’s Manual Actions report ↗

Search Console / Report example

Manual actions

User-generated spam (this page also covers Spammy free host)

WHAT IS A USER-GENERATED SPAM MANUAL ACTION?

A user-generated spam manual action means Google has detected spam on your pages that was submitted by site visitors and not by you, typically on forum threads, guestbook pages, blog comments or user profile pages. It's the manual action that feels the most unfair to receive, because you haven't done anything to manipulate Google yourself, however Google's position is that you're responsible for what gets published on your site and it expects you to keep it clean.

WHAT DOES IT DO TO YOUR SITE?

The action normally applies to the pages carrying the spam and not the whole site, so the damage is contained to begin with, however if the spam is left to build up it can affect Google's overall view of the site, which is why it's worth dealing with promptly. If you run a free hosting service or a platform where users create their own sites and a significant fraction of them are spammy, Google can issue a separate Spammy free host action against the whole service, and the clean-up for that follows the same approach on a bigger scale.

Scope: User publishing areas
Typical clean-up time: Estimated after diagnosis
Review time: Several days or weeks

WHY DID GOOGLE ISSUE IT?

Your forum allows anyone to register and post without moderation, and it has filled up with threads advertising unrelated products and services

User profile pages allow a bio and a website link, and bots have created thousands of profiles with commercial usernames linking out to unrelated sites

Blog comments are open with no spam filtering and followed links, so automated tools have been posting to them for years

An old community section, guestbook or Q&A area that nobody looks after any more is still live and indexable

Posts and profiles are being created automatically and contain gibberish or auto-generated text

HOW DO WE FIX IT?

We identify every part of your site where a user can add content and pull the full list of profiles, posts and comments from the database
Spam entry points
Evidence log · User-generated spam
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We find the spam using patterns in usernames, links, registration data and content, along with site: searches for the commercial and adult terms that have no business being on your site
Post and profile inventory
Evidence log · User-generated spam
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We remove the spam content and the accounts behind it in bulk, working with your developers where that needs doing directly in the database
Removal log
Evidence log · User-generated spam
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We put prevention in place, i.e. moderation for new users, CAPTCHA and spam filtering, rel="ugc" or nofollow on user-submitted links and noindex on new or untrusted profiles and posts
Moderation safeguards
Evidence log · User-generated spam
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We write and submit the reconsideration request, and we check back after a few weeks to make sure the spam isn't returning
Submission record
Evidence log · User-generated spam
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date

WHAT GOES INTO THE RECONSIDERATION REQUEST?

The request tells the reviewer where the spam was, how much of it was removed and, most importantly, what has been changed to stop it coming back, because removing a batch of spam without closing the door it came through just means the reviewer will find new spam when they look.

Reconsideration request service →

Questions about recovery

Should I just turn off comments or close the forum?

If the section isn't adding anything for your real users then removing it is a perfectly good fix, and if it is valuable then moderation and spam controls will let you keep it.

Will this affect the rest of my site?

The action itself is aimed at the pages with spam on them, however leaving large amounts of it in place can affect how Google assesses the site overall.

How long does recovery take?

Your diagnostic will include a clean-up estimate, and Google’s review usually takes several days or weeks, with link reviews sometimes taking longer.

Start your recovery brief