"Major spam problems" manual action: what it means and whether to rebuild
This action says the site "appears to use aggressive spam techniques such as scaled content abuse, cloaking, and/or other repeated or egregious violations of Google's spam policies." Older guides and forum threads call it the "Pure spam" action; Google's current documentation lists it as Major spam problems. It usually applies to the whole site. When you expand the entry, expect "Affects all pages" rather than a folder pattern, and often the site stops appearing in Google Search at all, sometimes even for its own brand name.
Google's recommended actions are only two lines long: stop violating the policies, then request review with examples of bad content removed and good content added. The short list hides a large job. For many sites the honest question is whether anything worth keeping is left.
How WordPress sites get here
The sites that receive this action are rarely a normal blog with one bad habit. Typical profiles:
- Mass AI publishing: thousands of posts generated from keyword lists by a content plugin or script, published faster than anyone could read them. Google's scaled content abuse policy covers this regardless of how the text was produced.
- Scraped or spun networks: feeds and competitor articles republished with synonyms swapped or machine translation.
- Expired domain plays: a domain with old links bought and filled with unrelated content to ride its history.
- Cloaking combined with any of the above, often through a plugin that serves one version to crawlers.
- A hacked site where injected spam pages vastly outnumber the real ones. If that is you, the cleanup belongs on the security side first; see Hacked: URL injection.
If you bought the domain after the spam was published, say so in your request. Google's help page asks recent buyers to explain the acquisition.
Deciding between cleanup and a fresh start
Be honest about the ratio of spam to real content. If a small core of original, useful pages sits under a mountain of generated ones, cleanup is realistic: remove the generated material and rebuild around the core. If almost everything was produced to rank rather than to help anyone, a review will look at what remains, and an empty site with a few new posts does not show much.
Look at the site through a stranger's eyes. Would a visitor who landed on a random post learn something they could not get elsewhere? Would they know who wrote it and why? If the answer for most pages is no, the rebuild is the project, and the request comes at the end of it rather than the start.
Things that do not work: moving the same content to a new domain (the policies apply wherever it lives), redirecting the penalized domain to a fresh one, or deleting a few hundred posts out of tens of thousands. A reviewer sees the site as a visitor would, so the remaining content has to stand on its own.
Removing spam content in bulk
When the spam was generated as posts, WP-CLI is faster than the admin screens. Identify the batch by author, date range, category or a meta key the generator left behind, check the list, then delete:
# Review first: how many posts the generator's user account created
wp post list --post_type=post --author=7 --format=count
wp post list --post_type=post --author=7 --fields=ID,post_title,post_date | head -50
# Delete permanently; leave off --force to send them to the trash instead
wp post delete $(wp post list --post_type=post --author=7 --format=ids) --force
Deleted posts return a 404, which is the right answer for spam. Do not redirect them all to the homepage. Remove the generator plugin itself, and any scheduled tasks it created (wp cron event list). Keep a record of counts and URL patterns as you go, because that is the evidence your request needs. Hydrogen SEO clears its sitemap cache when content changes, so deleted posts drop out of the XML sitemap on their own; resubmit it in Search Console so Google fetches the smaller list. If the generator created its own post type or taxonomy, switch that type off under Hydrogen SEO → Sitemap too, or remove it entirely.
The review request and realistic odds
Write the request as an account of what changed, with scale:
The site published ~24,000 AI-generated posts from keyword lists between
March and October 2024. All have been deleted (they now return 404),
the generation plugin is removed and the author account disabled.
The site now has 61 posts written and edited by named staff, listed at
/blog/. Examples: /guides/choosing-a-heat-pump/, /about/
We will not use automated bulk publishing again.
Select Request Review once all of it is done. Google says reviews can take several days or weeks and sends the outcome by email. Some owners get a rejection and need a second, more complete cleanup before a request succeeds. Even after the action is revoked, the site starts from its remaining content, not its former traffic, so plan as if you are building a new site on an old domain.
Common questions
Is major spam problems the same as pure spam?
It is the same category. Google's current documentation uses the name Major spam problems for sites that use aggressive spam techniques, and older messages and guides refer to it as pure spam.
Can I move my content to a new domain instead?
Moving the same content does not fix the violation, and Google's policies apply to the new domain as well. Redirecting a penalized site to a new one can carry the problem across.
Is using AI to write content a violation?
Not by itself. The scaled content abuse policy targets generating many pages mainly to manipulate rankings without adding value, however they are made.
Will my traffic come back after the action is lifted?
There is no guarantee. Revocation removes the penalty, but the site is then ranked on the content that remains, which is often a small fraction of what it had.