5 ms·

Google deleted whocalled.us for “Pure Spam” and replaced it with spam

179 points by whocalledus 12y ago

In November Google completely removed whocalled.us from their search results. It was the first site of its kind, created in 2005 for crowdsourced info about telemarketing numbers. There were scripts for people to utilize in their VoIP boxes, and it was a good honest site. Google has been trying to weed out telephone spam in their results, and for some reason they deleted the original instead of the useless empty shell sites that spam every possible telephone number combination. If I search "whocalled.us" on Google now I see #1 the Google+ page for the site, and #2 a WordPress spam page. They deleted whocalled.us with a "Pure Spam" manual action, and literally replaced it with pure spam. whocalled.us has never used spam tactics. That is why copycats quickly beat it in terms of traffic. The first competitor used spammy SEO techniques, and is often the #1 result now for telephone number searches. I've been making websites since before Google existed, and it feels like my ways are going extinct. Prior to this "Pure Spam" removal, there was a partial action for unnatural links. I was shocked that a search engine sent me a notice that my website would be penalized unless I contacted other websites to have them remove links to my site. Remove links? That is the whole point of the web! It included some suggestions of "spam" sites with links to mine, and when I clicked one I saw someone's personal blog with some links to their favorite sites. I don't know what world this is, where a search engine tells a webmaster they need to contact a small-time blog owner to have them remove a link recommending your site, but it's not mine. To me this is still the World Wide Web, where little guys like me can play on the same field as global giants. But in reality, this is Google's game now, and when they kick you off their field, there's not much to do but sulk and go home.

madsravn 12y ago
I'm not sure what your site is about. Looking at it right now, nothing really is stated about the numbers who called. It's a lot of empty fields and "unknown"s. I can't see why Google would penalize you like this unless you have been suspected of doing dirty work.
vgeek 12y ago
You probably didn't spend enough on AdWords.
arkitaip 12y ago
There is very little meaningful content on your site, which makes it hard to see how it is different from the spam sites.
wallflower 12y ago
If I had to guess, they are probably going to introduce a similar service to their Google Voice service soon (e.g. a 'spam' filter that auto directs/categorizes > voice mail). Too many ppl I know get spammed by recruiters because they once made a mistake of putting their real contact phone number on a resume for a major jobs board.
mtmail 12y ago
Your sitemap contains about 1 million URLs. When I look at http://whocalled.us/lookup/2104495665 http://whocalled.us/lookup/2104495665 I see hardly information other than the phone number itself. And Google Adsense advertising. Most of the pages look exactly the same. The ones linked on the homepage contain profanity. The category pages, e.g. http://whocalled.us/lookup/sanantonio http://whocalled.us/lookup/sanantonio are just lists of numbers. From the outside it looks like a typical content database where every entry is a page with advertising. I can imagine those are no longer in the new Google algorithm's favor. What makes you think your website deserves to be listed on The usual process to get Google employees to reconsider indexing the website again is called a reconsideration request https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en "I've been making websites since before Google existed, and it feels like my ways are going extinct." Yes I think creating content databases and giving every piece of information a URL and adding untargeted Adsense is no longer a business. Spammers (not whocalled.us) have been misusing that SEO tactic for too long.
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  > The usual process to get Google employees to reconsider indexing the website again is called a reconsideration request https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en Doesn't that just get filed to dev/null and marked closed after being sent some copypasta that suggests no one ever read the email? That does seem to be the Google Way.
  - whocalledus 12y ago
    After the first few reconsideration requests, I questioned whether they were truly read by a human. The time between request and response was often the same, but not always. Whether I wrote a descriptive formal reasoning for reconsideration, or simply "You're idiots.", I still received the same exact template message: > Reconsideration request for http://whocalled.us/ http://whocalled.us/: Site violates Google's quality guidelines > February 14, 2015 > Google received a reconsideration request from a site owner for http://whocalled.us/ http://whocalled.us/. > We've reviewed your site and we believe that http://whocalled.us/ http://whocalled.us/ still violates our quality guidelines. These guidelines outline illicit practices which may lead Google to take action on a site in order to keep webspam out of search results. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://whocalled.us/ http://whocalled.us/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. > Please correct or remove all content that is outside our quality guidelines. Keep in mind that simply deleting all of your site’s content and immediately requesting reconsideration will not lead to success. Instead we recommend that you spend considerable time and effort to make sure your site provides original, valuable content for users. In order to have a successful reconsideration request, you will need to show that your updated site contains content that does not violate our guidelines. > For more specific information about the status of your site, visit the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools. From there, you may request reconsideration of your site again when you believe your site no longer violates the quality guidelines.
uptown 12y ago
I can't speak to why they've penalized you, but it sounds similar to what they did with RapGenius. Rap Genius would pay others to link to them to help increase their pagerank. Google caught wind of it, and penalized them for gaming the system. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no-seo-genius-lyric-site-fails-to-recover-traffic-after-google-penalty http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no-... I'm not sure why they think you've done the same - but that's likely why they are blaming you for the links others have created to your site. I agree - if you did nothing to encourage those links to be created, it's difficult to see how you should be responsible for their removal, but hopefully the article I've linked will give you more context as to what Google is probably trying to weed out from their search results in order to help you get it resolved.
- graeme 12y ago
  It's not just payment. Google also considers an unnatural link profile as evidence of spammy actions. This is perhaps reasonable in isolation and in most cases. But it certainly raises the possibility of negative SEO, where you point large numbers of spam links to a competitor's site in order to blacklist them with Google. See this for example: http://moz.com/blog/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalties-and-negative-seo http://moz.com/blog/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalti... I run a site that has received a few tens of thousands of visitors. I checked webmaster tools. I have a bunch of spam links from btclush.com, marqueefy.com and some russian sites. I can't actually find the linking pages, btclush.com itself is blank and all content is on subdomains. It's not clear to me what I, a small webmaster, should be doing about this. I'm hoping these sites send spam links to almost every site – in that case presumably google is aware that site owners are not at fault. I don't have the time to contact spam sites to tell them not to link to me or to disavow all these links. Note that the composition of the spam links changes. The last time I checked different spam sites were linking to me.
sleazebreeze 12y ago
As a side note, thank you for creating that site. My phone number was sold some time ago and I regularly get telemarketers calling me and a quick google search of any unknown number would find your site and let me make the determination to answer or not.
klenwell 12y ago
Sorry to hear this. I always like whocalled.us. I thought it a useful service. I used to Google strange numbers I didn't recognize that called my cell phone (until I just started ignoring them all together). I didn't really care who gave me an answer, but among all the copycat sites that quickly popped up, I came to recognize whocalled.us as a legitimate source of the info I was looking for. It seemed the most active and least spammy of its class. Was it perhaps the target of some of the sleazy blackhat SEO tactics that have been discussed elsewhere on this site?
jayzalowitz 12y ago
Create an android app that automatically sends telemarketers to voice mail?
- jumpbox_ 12y ago
  Is it possible to forward the call to a premium rate sex line at no cost to the user? That would be great to know they are being charged a lot of money for the first minute to a premium rate number as soon as they are connected every time.
- qiqing 12y ago
  Spam calls are a much larger problem in China. If only we had Xiaomi's spam filtering features in the phone's UI. "MIUI users can label an incoming call as spam by tapping a button, if enough people do it all MIUI users will see the number as spam."[1] 1. http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/12/liveblog-xiaomi-explains-itself-to-silicon-valley/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/12/liveblog-xiaomi-explains-it...
RandomCode 12y ago
God is perfectly just.
z3t4 12y ago
One huge aspect of the problem is that the browser developers are in bed with the search engines. Whatever you type in the address bar, it will be redirected to Google or Bing. I would almost go so far as to say browsers and search engines are killing the web. It's no longer a web. People will tell you to not depend on the search engines. But what do you do now when you are blocked? Start advertising on AdWords? LOL! My advice is to build a community. Get people involved with your site, make them return often.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pyre 12y ago
  > I would almost go so far as to say browsers and search engines are killing the web. It's no longer a web. How do you want people to find things on the web if not via search engine? Do you want to go back to the days of the "Web Ring?" Or are people supposed to crowd source their search via their social graph on Facebook?
  - z3t4 12y ago
    I have nothing against search engines. What I'm concerned about is that many people do not use links or addresses, they just search! When people no longer use addresses to access stuff, the web will be broken. Crowd sourced search is actually not a bad idea! Most things are still discovered through mouth-to-mouth and sites like HN. Search engines has a long way to go before they can actually make better suggestions then humans.
bitL 12y ago
I am almost sure this is a machine learning fail on Google's side. Your site probably matches some spammy profile and they just treat their algorithms as objective truth beyond certain threshold. I think we should all get used to this broken AI everywhere for the next 20 years...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
zach 12y ago
Essentially, this is the way that Google sets the standard for acceptable web content. It's subjective, it's vague, and sometimes unfair but that's the burden they have to bear. Defining the "quality" of a web page for a search has become as important a factor to web search as any other. But "search quality" is a leaky abstraction like any other. When someone looks up a random phone number that just called them, they aren't looking for a blog post about it. They're looking for a very small amount of information. Let's imagine we're determining the quality of a web page as a search result. Say we're looking for the combatants of the Second Boer War, so our query is "second boer war combatants". Now, if we had a page that listed only and exactly the names of those combatants, that would seem to be the "answer" we're looking for. But wait, isn't it better to see a page about the Second Boer War which has a lot of other information about the conflict? Or a page about the military history of the most notable combatant? Or even a table of major historical conflicts with their combatants? Basically, although it would seem like a precise "answer page" is the best, there are a lot of other factors. The most popular kind of search results are often Wikipedia pages, so people seem to want that level of information on a subject. People sometimes search for something as a way to get to something else. The nature of the web indicates that pages with links to further information are more useful than those without them. And of course, as untrustworthy sites proliferate, the more well-compiled, organized and correlated information is on a page, the more reliable it is. So ultimately, I feel like it's inevitable. As search has improved, Google has to make these kind of choices, in a quantifiable way, about the nature of a quality search result. And that ends up, in the tools-make-us stage of the web we're in, shaping the envelope of what web content is popular, even in some way acceptable. In turn, the web becomes easier for Google users to use by becoming easier for Google to index and search effectively. But this is the more painful reality, as I also know. You get pushed out of the Google results not by sites with better information, not by sites that are more relevant, but by sites which seem like they can play the "Google game" better because they have the resources and profit motive to put together good metrics for the myriad signals that make you rise in the ranks.
hackaflocka 12y ago
Google hires people from the top universities. People with 4.0 GPAs. People who go through strenuous interviews where they are asked questions such as "how would you move the pyramids of Egypt." You live in their world. This is their world. Assume that they did something right, and you did something wrong.
gress 12y ago
I have been receiving spam calls recently despite being on the national do not call register. Thanks to google, I wasn aware of this resource until today. There is no defense against Google's actions here other than to acknowledge that they make mistakes and need to take more responsibility given the power they hold. If they don't become more transparent about appealing these mistakes, eventually we as a society should develop a legal recourse. There simply isn't enough competition in search to enable these kinds of errors to be corrected through market mechanisms.
tehwebguy 12y ago
In my opinion you have been extremely fortunate to have made it this long before getting smacked down. Continue for my opinion which is pretty harsh: 1. Almost all of your pages probably have no content You've got 1.9M+ calls. Some numbers like 2145627653 have multiple calls but none of them provide anything new. Others like 4802550681 have 1 or more calls but no information other than city + state which is available on like every phone now. Others have no calls, no information at all. 2. As a result, almost all search users probably bounce, immediately People want to know who is calling them, right now. They have like 6 seconds before the caller hangs up so they need to know - when they realize there is no information they are going to bail. They are also going to be pissed off that the top result on Google is asking them for information rather than giving it to them. 3. Your traffic is probably almost exclusively from search Again I'm guessing here but I can't imagine that you are getting more than 5-10% of your traffic from sources outside of people searching for information on a phone number. That says to me that people don't think there is a reason to come back. Yeah, you were first, but who cares? Your site sat around pissing off search engine users (including me) for a decade and still looks like the MVP it was in 2006. You may not be actively spamming the web but your website is passively spamming Google. Those other guys might be worse but who cares? That doesn't change the other facts and their punishment will likely come soon. That argument doesn't get you off the hook with Google. If you want to get back on top you're going to need a better offering than effectively being the first result on Google and a comments system.
- whocalledus 12y ago
  There's a couple million phone calls reported, but there's less than a million telephone number pages for Google to index. There's 63 thousand numbers with more than 1 comment, 195 thousand with at least 1. If the problem is that the caller ID name with date of call is not rich enough data for Google, then I can limit the sitemap to only pages with textual comments. But Google is not saying that, or that they will reinclude it if I do that. They're not saying anything except that the site is using illicit practices. Prior to Google removing whocalled.us, it accounted for 68% of traffic. 15% was direct, 6% Yahoo, 4.6% Bing. The fact that it is an extension of search, and not primarily a website people want to return to does not in any way demote its value to people. I do not visit Wikipedia directly, but I still want it in my search results. If the time of this kind of site is over, then great, remove them all. Why pick on whocalled.us?
toddkaufmann 12y ago
Suppose 100 top spam sites all had a portion of some top legitimate content site (like NYT). Wouldn't this lower the ranking of the legitimate site? Ignoring other factors like number of incoming links--which for whocalled.us is probably a low number (why would anyone link to it?)--it seems like spam could (temporarily at least) pull down the others somewhat especially once any results can make it to the first page and get some clicks. In fact if there are 10 spam sites that link to each other or use some slimy affiliates they might get better listings. I use services "like" whocalled.us all the time, usually for nearly every incoming number I don't recognize, before answering. I've seen whocalled.us and used it before, others equally often. I've noted a couple times (and even bookmarked I think) "this site seems less spammy than the others), but I don't remember which. If there were some way to differentiate yourself from the others... allow people to register themselves as not telemarketers, or a business listing, or say who you are? I don't see how to verify or prevent abuse. I'm sure you've thought about this much more than me.

179 points by whocalledus 12y ago

madsravn 12y ago

I'm not sure what your site is about. Looking at it right now, nothing really is stated about the numbers who called. It's a lot of empty fields and "unknown"s. I can't see why Google would penalize you like this unless you have been suspected of doing dirty work.

vgeek 12y ago

You probably didn't spend enough on AdWords.

arkitaip 12y ago

There is very little meaningful content on your site, which makes it hard to see how it is different from the spam sites.

wallflower 12y ago

If I had to guess, they are probably going to introduce a similar service to their Google Voice service soon (e.g. a 'spam' filter that auto directs/categorizes > voice mail). Too many ppl I know get spammed by recruiters because they once made a mistake of putting their real contact phone number on a resume for a major jobs board.

mtmail 12y ago

Your sitemap contains about 1 million URLs. When I look at http://whocalled.us/lookup/2104495665 http://whocalled.us/lookup/2104495665 I see hardly information other than the phone number itself. And Google Adsense advertising. Most of the pages look exactly the same. The ones linked on the homepage contain profanity. The category pages, e.g. http://whocalled.us/lookup/sanantonio http://whocalled.us/lookup/sanantonio are just lists of numbers. From the outside it looks like a typical content database where every entry is a page with advertising. I can imagine those are no longer in the new Google algorithm's favor. What makes you think your website deserves to be listed on The usual process to get Google employees to reconsider indexing the website again is called a reconsideration request https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en "I've been making websites since before Google existed, and it feels like my ways are going extinct." Yes I think creating content databases and giving every piece of information a URL and adding untargeted Adsense is no longer a business. Spammers (not whocalled.us) have been misusing that SEO tactic for too long.

barry-cotter 12y ago
> The usual process to get Google employees to reconsider indexing the website again is called a reconsideration request https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en Doesn't that just get filed to dev/null and marked closed after being sent some copypasta that suggests no one ever read the email? That does seem to be the Google Way.
- whocalledus 12y ago
  After the first few reconsideration requests, I questioned whether they were truly read by a human. The time between request and response was often the same, but not always. Whether I wrote a descriptive formal reasoning for reconsideration, or simply "You're idiots.", I still received the same exact template message: > Reconsideration request for http://whocalled.us/ http://whocalled.us/: Site violates Google's quality guidelines > February 14, 2015 > Google received a reconsideration request from a site owner for http://whocalled.us/ http://whocalled.us/. > We've reviewed your site and we believe that http://whocalled.us/ http://whocalled.us/ still violates our quality guidelines. These guidelines outline illicit practices which may lead Google to take action on a site in order to keep webspam out of search results. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://whocalled.us/ http://whocalled.us/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. > Please correct or remove all content that is outside our quality guidelines. Keep in mind that simply deleting all of your site’s content and immediately requesting reconsideration will not lead to success. Instead we recommend that you spend considerable time and effort to make sure your site provides original, valuable content for users. In order to have a successful reconsideration request, you will need to show that your updated site contains content that does not violate our guidelines. > For more specific information about the status of your site, visit the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools. From there, you may request reconsideration of your site again when you believe your site no longer violates the quality guidelines.

uptown 12y ago

I can't speak to why they've penalized you, but it sounds similar to what they did with RapGenius. Rap Genius would pay others to link to them to help increase their pagerank. Google caught wind of it, and penalized them for gaming the system. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no-seo-genius-lyric-site-fails-to-recover-traffic-after-google-penalty http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no-... I'm not sure why they think you've done the same - but that's likely why they are blaming you for the links others have created to your site. I agree - if you did nothing to encourage those links to be created, it's difficult to see how you should be responsible for their removal, but hopefully the article I've linked will give you more context as to what Google is probably trying to weed out from their search results in order to help you get it resolved.

graeme 12y ago
It's not just payment. Google also considers an unnatural link profile as evidence of spammy actions. This is perhaps reasonable in isolation and in most cases. But it certainly raises the possibility of negative SEO, where you point large numbers of spam links to a competitor's site in order to blacklist them with Google. See this for example: http://moz.com/blog/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalties-and-negative-seo http://moz.com/blog/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalti... I run a site that has received a few tens of thousands of visitors. I checked webmaster tools. I have a bunch of spam links from btclush.com, marqueefy.com and some russian sites. I can't actually find the linking pages, btclush.com itself is blank and all content is on subdomains. It's not clear to me what I, a small webmaster, should be doing about this. I'm hoping these sites send spam links to almost every site – in that case presumably google is aware that site owners are not at fault. I don't have the time to contact spam sites to tell them not to link to me or to disavow all these links. Note that the composition of the spam links changes. The last time I checked different spam sites were linking to me.

sleazebreeze 12y ago

As a side note, thank you for creating that site. My phone number was sold some time ago and I regularly get telemarketers calling me and a quick google search of any unknown number would find your site and let me make the determination to answer or not.

klenwell 12y ago

Sorry to hear this. I always like whocalled.us. I thought it a useful service. I used to Google strange numbers I didn't recognize that called my cell phone (until I just started ignoring them all together). I didn't really care who gave me an answer, but among all the copycat sites that quickly popped up, I came to recognize whocalled.us as a legitimate source of the info I was looking for. It seemed the most active and least spammy of its class. Was it perhaps the target of some of the sleazy blackhat SEO tactics that have been discussed elsewhere on this site?

jayzalowitz 12y ago

Create an android app that automatically sends telemarketers to voice mail?

jumpbox_ 12y ago
Is it possible to forward the call to a premium rate sex line at no cost to the user? That would be great to know they are being charged a lot of money for the first minute to a premium rate number as soon as they are connected every time.
qiqing 12y ago
Spam calls are a much larger problem in China. If only we had Xiaomi's spam filtering features in the phone's UI. "MIUI users can label an incoming call as spam by tapping a button, if enough people do it all MIUI users will see the number as spam."[1] 1. http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/12/liveblog-xiaomi-explains-itself-to-silicon-valley/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/12/liveblog-xiaomi-explains-it...

RandomCode 12y ago

God is perfectly just.

z3t4 12y ago

One huge aspect of the problem is that the browser developers are in bed with the search engines. Whatever you type in the address bar, it will be redirected to Google or Bing. I would almost go so far as to say browsers and search engines are killing the web. It's no longer a web. People will tell you to not depend on the search engines. But what do you do now when you are blocked? Start advertising on AdWords? LOL! My advice is to build a community. Get people involved with your site, make them return often.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pyre 12y ago
> I would almost go so far as to say browsers and search engines are killing the web. It's no longer a web. How do you want people to find things on the web if not via search engine? Do you want to go back to the days of the "Web Ring?" Or are people supposed to crowd source their search via their social graph on Facebook?
- z3t4 12y ago
  I have nothing against search engines. What I'm concerned about is that many people do not use links or addresses, they just search! When people no longer use addresses to access stuff, the web will be broken. Crowd sourced search is actually not a bad idea! Most things are still discovered through mouth-to-mouth and sites like HN. Search engines has a long way to go before they can actually make better suggestions then humans.

bitL 12y ago

I am almost sure this is a machine learning fail on Google's side. Your site probably matches some spammy profile and they just treat their algorithms as objective truth beyond certain threshold. I think we should all get used to this broken AI everywhere for the next 20 years...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

zach 12y ago

Essentially, this is the way that Google sets the standard for acceptable web content. It's subjective, it's vague, and sometimes unfair but that's the burden they have to bear. Defining the "quality" of a web page for a search has become as important a factor to web search as any other. But "search quality" is a leaky abstraction like any other. When someone looks up a random phone number that just called them, they aren't looking for a blog post about it. They're looking for a very small amount of information. Let's imagine we're determining the quality of a web page as a search result. Say we're looking for the combatants of the Second Boer War, so our query is "second boer war combatants". Now, if we had a page that listed only and exactly the names of those combatants, that would seem to be the "answer" we're looking for. But wait, isn't it better to see a page about the Second Boer War which has a lot of other information about the conflict? Or a page about the military history of the most notable combatant? Or even a table of major historical conflicts with their combatants? Basically, although it would seem like a precise "answer page" is the best, there are a lot of other factors. The most popular kind of search results are often Wikipedia pages, so people seem to want that level of information on a subject. People sometimes search for something as a way to get to something else. The nature of the web indicates that pages with links to further information are more useful than those without them. And of course, as untrustworthy sites proliferate, the more well-compiled, organized and correlated information is on a page, the more reliable it is. So ultimately, I feel like it's inevitable. As search has improved, Google has to make these kind of choices, in a quantifiable way, about the nature of a quality search result. And that ends up, in the tools-make-us stage of the web we're in, shaping the envelope of what web content is popular, even in some way acceptable. In turn, the web becomes easier for Google users to use by becoming easier for Google to index and search effectively. But this is the more painful reality, as I also know. You get pushed out of the Google results not by sites with better information, not by sites that are more relevant, but by sites which seem like they can play the "Google game" better because they have the resources and profit motive to put together good metrics for the myriad signals that make you rise in the ranks.

hackaflocka 12y ago

Google hires people from the top universities. People with 4.0 GPAs. People who go through strenuous interviews where they are asked questions such as "how would you move the pyramids of Egypt." You live in their world. This is their world. Assume that they did something right, and you did something wrong.

gress 12y ago

I have been receiving spam calls recently despite being on the national do not call register. Thanks to google, I wasn aware of this resource until today. There is no defense against Google's actions here other than to acknowledge that they make mistakes and need to take more responsibility given the power they hold. If they don't become more transparent about appealing these mistakes, eventually we as a society should develop a legal recourse. There simply isn't enough competition in search to enable these kinds of errors to be corrected through market mechanisms.

tehwebguy 12y ago

In my opinion you have been extremely fortunate to have made it this long before getting smacked down. Continue for my opinion which is pretty harsh: 1. Almost all of your pages probably have no content You've got 1.9M+ calls. Some numbers like 2145627653 have multiple calls but none of them provide anything new. Others like 4802550681 have 1 or more calls but no information other than city + state which is available on like every phone now. Others have no calls, no information at all. 2. As a result, almost all search users probably bounce, immediately People want to know who is calling them, right now. They have like 6 seconds before the caller hangs up so they need to know - when they realize there is no information they are going to bail. They are also going to be pissed off that the top result on Google is asking them for information rather than giving it to them. 3. Your traffic is probably almost exclusively from search Again I'm guessing here but I can't imagine that you are getting more than 5-10% of your traffic from sources outside of people searching for information on a phone number. That says to me that people don't think there is a reason to come back. Yeah, you were first, but who cares? Your site sat around pissing off search engine users (including me) for a decade and still looks like the MVP it was in 2006. You may not be actively spamming the web but your website is passively spamming Google. Those other guys might be worse but who cares? That doesn't change the other facts and their punishment will likely come soon. That argument doesn't get you off the hook with Google. If you want to get back on top you're going to need a better offering than effectively being the first result on Google and a comments system.

whocalledus 12y ago
There's a couple million phone calls reported, but there's less than a million telephone number pages for Google to index. There's 63 thousand numbers with more than 1 comment, 195 thousand with at least 1. If the problem is that the caller ID name with date of call is not rich enough data for Google, then I can limit the sitemap to only pages with textual comments. But Google is not saying that, or that they will reinclude it if I do that. They're not saying anything except that the site is using illicit practices. Prior to Google removing whocalled.us, it accounted for 68% of traffic. 15% was direct, 6% Yahoo, 4.6% Bing. The fact that it is an extension of search, and not primarily a website people want to return to does not in any way demote its value to people. I do not visit Wikipedia directly, but I still want it in my search results. If the time of this kind of site is over, then great, remove them all. Why pick on whocalled.us?

toddkaufmann 12y ago

Suppose 100 top spam sites all had a portion of some top legitimate content site (like NYT). Wouldn't this lower the ranking of the legitimate site? Ignoring other factors like number of incoming links--which for whocalled.us is probably a low number (why would anyone link to it?)--it seems like spam could (temporarily at least) pull down the others somewhat especially once any results can make it to the first page and get some clicks. In fact if there are 10 spam sites that link to each other or use some slimy affiliates they might get better listings. I use services "like" whocalled.us all the time, usually for nearly every incoming number I don't recognize, before answering. I've seen whocalled.us and used it before, others equally often. I've noted a couple times (and even bookmarked I think) "this site seems less spammy than the others), but I don't remember which. If there were some way to differentiate yourself from the others... allow people to register themselves as not telemarketers, or a business listing, or say who you are? I don't see how to verify or prevent abuse. I'm sure you've thought about this much more than me.