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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
How does Google handle fractions in titles?
Which is better practice, using 1/2" or ½"? The keyword research suggests people search for "1 2" with the space being the "/". How does Google handle fractions? Would ½ be the same as 1/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice2 -
Brand name not ranking in Google
Hi Moz'ers, Could you help me with something I cannot seem to figure out by myself. In June 2017 my company started a rebranding campaign. We've changed our brand name and launched a new website: https://spotler.com. Everything is going fine, but if you Google our brand name "Spotler" our website doesn't show up. How can it be? Our domain authority is 38. It would be wonderful if you could help me. Let me know if you need more information. Best, Simone
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spotler0 -
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 does not want to index my page
I have a site that is hundreds of page indexed on Google. But there is a page that I put in the footer section that Google seems does not like and are not indexing that page. I've tried submitting it to their index through google webmaster and it will appear on Google index but then after a few days it's gone again. Before that page had canonical meta to another page, but it is removed now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | odihost0 -
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 -
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