Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
My website is penalized from google with no message in GWT.
-
On 26 of October 2018 My website have around 1 million pages indexed on google. but after hour when I checked my website was banned from google and all pages were removed. I checked my GWT and I did not receive any message. Can any one tell me what are the possible reasons and how can I recover my website? My website link is https://www.whoseno.com
-
Would you be able to send me a dm with a copy of that email? I'm interested in larger sized automatic sites and trying to figure out where the limit is (and how yours isn't allowed when others are)
-
Thank you for your responses. I just received email from google after 3 days with the reason. They are saying you website is generating automatic content.
-
This is a really fascinating question. It's highly irregular for Google to de-list a site with absolutely no reason given. Even if it's something really bad like serving malware to Google's users, you usually get a hacked content notification
Your assertion that your site has been de-listed by Google due to data you are seeing in various analytics packages is backed up by Google's front-end:
- https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awhoseno.com
- https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awhoseno.com
- https://www.google.fr/search?q=site%3Awhoseno.com
- https://www.google.bg/search?q=site%3Awhoseno.com
I can't find any pages from your site in Google US, UK, France or Bulgaria. Whatever has happened they seem to have gone fairly thermonuclear!
I performed a 25% crawl of your site using Screaming Frog (rendering / JS enabled), using Google's user agent (Googlebot). Some pages returned an error 404:
- https://www.whoseno.com/number-information
- https://www.whoseno.com/whose-number-is-this
- https://www.whoseno.com/track-location
- https://www.whoseno.com/get-mobile-number-details
- https://www.whoseno.com/phone-number-details
- https://www.whoseno.com/get-complete-details-of-your-ex
- https://www.whoseno.com/track-any-mobile-number
- https://www.whoseno.com/wrong-number
- https://www.whoseno.com/whose-number-is-this-calling-me
- https://www.whoseno.com/phone-number-search
- https://www.whoseno.com/recent-lookups-on-whoseno
- https://www.whoseno.com/get-details-of-any-mobile
- https://www.whoseno.com/get-details-of-any-phone-number-for-free
- https://www.whoseno.com/trace-location-on-map
- https://www.whoseno.com/reverse-directory
- https://www.whoseno.com/track-location-by-phone-number
- https://www.whoseno.com/reverse-phone-lookup
- https://www.whoseno.com/phone-number-lookup
- https://www.whoseno.com/reverse-phone-lookup-service
Although this seems like quite a few broken pages, there were many more which were rendering properly. This just looks like the kind of stuff which Google would flag as crawl errors, rather than taking a site down in its entirety when the majority of pages return 200 (OK).
Some of the URLs like, getting "complete details about your ex" Google may frown upon. People shouldn't really be able to go on a site and get complete details for their ex-partner as that promotes stalking (something which Google is firmly against, and which most first-world governments are moving to take more and more action on). Even if the name of the page is misleading and it doesn't (when working) really supply that functionality, that then makes it a spam page instead (as it looks to satisfy unscrupulous users looking for such information and then fails to deliver).
Out of the pages which are returning 200 (OK), most of them are individual phone number pages. An example might be this page: https://www.whoseno.com/US/2014623561 - the number has been publicly logged as spam. With the advent of GDPR legislation, if you are logging phone numbers and publicly keeping a database of them (without the permission of the phone number's owner) then you may be in breach of new European GDPR legislation (read about it here).
Google wants to continue operating in Europe, so whilst they may be an American company GDPR does heavily impact Google. They want to comply with GDPR
I checked the technical indexation of your pages, there don't seem to be any huge red flags.
- Robots.txt isn't blocking critical pages and resources
- Nor is the Meta no-index tag
- Canonical tags don't seems to be de-indexing real pages and pointing Google to broken ones
- Google's user-agent seems to be able to access most pages properly
I decided to search for your site on Bing to see if they had also de-indexed you:
Bing still holds pages and records of your domain.
One of the results really interested me. There's a Twitter profile listed on those search results, the SERP snippet reads like this:
"Hussɑin Aвduℓℓɑtif (@whoseno) | Twitter
The latest Tweets from Hussɑin Aвduℓℓɑtif (@whoseno_)"_
The Twitter profile has been suspended. This may or may not be your Twitter profile. If it's not your Twitter profile, your digital identity may have accidentally been combined with this person's who may or may not have Twitter ToS or state-level action against them
You need to go to Google's Webmaster support forum here and ask them what the deal is.
It's unlikely to be Penguin / link related and I don't think it's tech related either. It could be GDPR concerns, pollution of your digital identity - combined with a 3rd party who has state-level action against them, or it could be a basic 'Google glitch'
-
Ok, this one may be interesting, if it's none of these options below I'd love to take a deeper look, send me a dm on twitter: https://twitter.com/thomasharvey_me
So, I see that you're on Cloudflare, are you still being crawled by Google?
Have you looked in the old search console? Have you or anyone you work with done anything in the "remove urls" section?
Have you seen any change in crawl stats recently?
Any recent changes to the site that may have caused this?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why has my website been removed from Bing?
I have a website that has recently been removed from Bing's index, but can't figure out why. The website isn't new, and it is indexed just fine on Google. These are the steps I've tried: The website is verified in Bing Webmaster Tools and successfully submitted the sitemap. I tested the URL to ensure that Bingbot is allowed to crawl the site I submitted URLs to Bing via the URL Submission tool There isn't a "noindex" on the site preventing it from being indexed When I do a URL Inspection, an error message comes up saying "The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing us from serving it to our users. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines." I contacted Bing to ask whether the website was removed in error, but received a reply that the website doesn't comply with Bing's quality guidelines, but they wouldn't go into detail as to which guidelines the website isn't meeting. The website URL is https://www.pardeehospital.org. Can anyone offer any advice or insight as to why Bing won't index our site? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lindsey.steinkamp0 -
Is possible to submit a XML sitemap to Google without using Google Search Console?
We have a client that will not grant us access to their Google Search Console (don't ask us why). Is there anyway possible to submit a XML sitemap to Google without using GSC? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index
I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains! company.com agency1.company.com agency2.company.com... I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google: demo.company.com demo.agency1.company.com demo.agency2.company.com... Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index? We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it? I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all. The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually. Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>
Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids0 -
My website (non-adult) is not appearing in Google search results when i have safe search settings on. How can i fix this?
Hi, I have this issue where my website does not appear in Google search results when i have the safe search settings on. If i turn the safe search settings off, my site appears no problem. I'm guessing Google is categorizing my website as adult, which it definitely is not. Has anyone had this issue before? Or does anyone know how to resolve this issue? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
How to find all indexed pages in Google?
Hi, We have an ecommerce site with around 4000 real pages. But our index count is at 47,000 pages in Google Webmaster Tools. How can I get a list of all pages indexed of our domain? trying to locate the duplicate content. Doing a "site:www.mydomain.com" only returns up to 676 results... Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Google is mixing subdomains. What can we do?
Hi! I'm experiencing something that's kind of strange for me. I have my main domain let's say: www.domain.com. Then I have my mobile version in a subdomain: mobile.domain.com and I also have a german version of the website de.domain.com. When I Google my domain I have the main result linking to: www.domain.com but then Google mixes all the domains in the sites links. For example a Sing in may be linking mobile.domain.com, a How it works link may be pointing to de.domain.com, etc What's the solution? I think this is hurting a lot my position cause google sees that all are the same domain when clearly is not. thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabrizzio0