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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

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?
- tehwebguy 12y ago
  My guess? Because you were first. I wouldn't be surprised if the others are gone soon. Side note, searching on your site pulls up a slightly different domain for me. Is that on purpose?
  - whocalledus 12y ago
    I think other sites are interfacing with whocalled.us through the HTML. I see it listed on sites like Spokeo where it shows comments, and I don't think they're using the API. Plus the site code is old, and people tend to dislike it when you mess with how their site works. So I made whocalld.us as a place to write a new interface from scratch that uses the same database. That is where I added fulltext indexing for search. Previously the search box on whocalled.us used Google Site Search. But I want to remove Google services, so rather than add fulltext search to whocalled.us, I pointed it to whocalld.us for now. I figured if I could rewrite the site to be better, then people would allow me to replace whocalled.us with that one. I thought maybe that's why Googlebot detected whocalled.us as spam, if it saw duplicate text on whocalld.us. But I tried things like denying Googlebot access to whocalld.us with robots.txt, and setting noindex in meta tags, but nothing helped. If that were the issue then a person could see I own both sites during the reconsideration request, and either remove the "Pure Spam" penalty or provide some clue as to how I should fix it. Besides, if that was enough to get my site removed, then what's stopping malicious people from doing the same to other sites? Either way, I should have the freedom to fork my own website to recode it if I want without having to worry about the Google police. I don't build websites for Google, so if this is how things work, I'll have to find a way to thrive on the web without Google's help. We did it before, and we can do it again. The other domain, whocalld.us, is also deleted as "Pure Spam" too.

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?

tehwebguy 12y ago
My guess? Because you were first. I wouldn't be surprised if the others are gone soon. Side note, searching on your site pulls up a slightly different domain for me. Is that on purpose?
- whocalledus 12y ago
  I think other sites are interfacing with whocalled.us through the HTML. I see it listed on sites like Spokeo where it shows comments, and I don't think they're using the API. Plus the site code is old, and people tend to dislike it when you mess with how their site works. So I made whocalld.us as a place to write a new interface from scratch that uses the same database. That is where I added fulltext indexing for search. Previously the search box on whocalled.us used Google Site Search. But I want to remove Google services, so rather than add fulltext search to whocalled.us, I pointed it to whocalld.us for now. I figured if I could rewrite the site to be better, then people would allow me to replace whocalled.us with that one. I thought maybe that's why Googlebot detected whocalled.us as spam, if it saw duplicate text on whocalld.us. But I tried things like denying Googlebot access to whocalld.us with robots.txt, and setting noindex in meta tags, but nothing helped. If that were the issue then a person could see I own both sites during the reconsideration request, and either remove the "Pure Spam" penalty or provide some clue as to how I should fix it. Besides, if that was enough to get my site removed, then what's stopping malicious people from doing the same to other sites? Either way, I should have the freedom to fork my own website to recode it if I want without having to worry about the Google police. I don't build websites for Google, so if this is how things work, I'll have to find a way to thrive on the web without Google's help. We did it before, and we can do it again. The other domain, whocalld.us, is also deleted as "Pure Spam" too.