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
-
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 -
My site shows 503 error to Google bot, but can see the site fine. Not indexing in Google. Help
Hi, This site is not indexed on Google at all. http://www.thethreehorseshoespub.co.uk Looking into it, it seems to be giving a 503 error to the google bot. I can see the site I have checked source code Checked robots Did have a sitemap param. but removed it for testing GWMT is showing 'unreachable' if I submit a site map or fetch Any ideas on how to remove this error? Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on? How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine. This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google Yet, no cache.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood2 -
Website completely delisted - reasons?
Hi, I got a request from a potential client as he do not understand why his website cannot be found on Google. I've checked that and found out that the complete website is not listed (complete delist) at all - expect just one pdf file.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheHecksler
I've checked his robots.txt - but this is ok. I've checked the META Robots - but they are on index,follow ... ok so far. I've checked his backlinks but could not found any massive linking from bad pages - just 6 backlinks and only four of them from designdomains.com which looks like a linklist or so. I've requested access to their GWT account if available in hope to find more infos, but does anyone of you may have a quick idea what els it could be? What could be the issue? I think that they got delisted due to any bad reason ... Let me know your Ideas 🙂 THANX 🙂 Sebi0 -
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 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
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 -
301 Redirect With A Message And Delay
Hello, I'd like to sell a site I own. I'd like the site to be redirected to the buyers site with a 301 redirect. But I'd like the viewer to be informed that the site was purchased by this company and they will be redirect in 5 seconds.I'd like for the redirect to be a complete 301 and pass as much linklove as possible. Are you familiar with how to do this? Thanks, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0