User-generated spam

Matt Cutts explains the "User-Generated Spam" manual action

If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, it means that Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of your site. Actions that affect your whole site are listed under Site-wide matches. Actions that affect only part of your site and/or some incoming links to your site are listed under Partial matches.

Recommended action

First, review Google’s Webmaster Guidelines on user-generated spam.

Next, follow the steps below to identify and correct the violation(s) on your site:

  1. Identify areas of your site where users can add content, such as forums, user profiles or blog comments.
  2. Check these areas for the following:
    1. Posts or profiles that look like advertisements
    2. Posts or profiles with out-of-context or off-topic links
    3. Posts or profiles with commercial usernames — names like “Discount Insurance,” that don’t sound like real human names — that link to unrelated sites
    4. Posts or profiles that appear to be automatically generated, not written by a real user of your site
    Tip: To find unexpected or spammy content on your site, use the site: operator in Google search along with commercial or adult keywords that are unrelated to your site’s topic. For example, searching for [site:example.com insurance] will return content from your site related to insurance.
  3. Remove any content that meets this description.
  4. Consider implementing measures to prevent user-generated spam.

Once you’re sure your site is no longer in violation of our guidelines, request reconsideration of your site. After you’ve submitted a reconsideration request, be patient and watch for a message in your Webmaster Tools account — we’ll let you know when we’ve reviewed your site. If we determine your site is no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action.