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?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
If my website do not have a robot.txt file, does it hurt my website ranking?
After a site audit, I find out that my website don't have a robot.txt. Does it hurt my website rankings? One more thing, when I type mywebsite.com/robot.txt, it automatically redirect to the homepage. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: http://bit.ly/1H2TArH We have set up a CDN on our own domain: http://bit.ly/292GkZC We have an image sitemap: http://bit.ly/29ca5s3 The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: http://bit.ly/29eNSXv. We used to have a disallow to /thumb/ which had a 301 redirect to our CDN but we removed both the disallow in the robots.txt as well as the 301. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alphonsehaThe above screenshot is from the GWT of our main domain.The GWT from the CDN subdomain just shows 0. We did not submit a sitemap to the verified subdomain property because we already have a sitemap submitted to the property on the main domain name. While making a search of images indexed from our CDN, nothing comes up: http://bit.ly/293ZbC1While checking the GWT of the CDN subdomain, I have been getting crawling errors, mainly 500 level errors. Not that many in comparison to the number of images and traffic that we get on our website. Google is crawling, but it seems like it just doesn't index the pictures!?
Can anyone help? I have followed all the information that I was able to find on the web but yet, our images on the CDN still can't seem to get indexed.
0 -
"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 -
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
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 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
If a website Uses <select>to dropdown some choices, will Google see every option as Content Or Hyperlink?</select>
If a website Uses <select> to dropdown some choices, will Google see every option as Content Or Hyperlink?</select>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Does Google hate wordpress?
I have my categories pages set to noindex, follow. I deactivated the author and date based archives, and all the /page/2 /page/3 are noindex. Is this the right approach? I had thought about adding some text to the topic of each category page and then changing them to index. I'm using showing recent post excerpts on the homepage. Another other suggestions? I think two of my sites are in panda for no good reason. It seems like non-wordpress blogs in my industry do better than comparable wordpress sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateV0