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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

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.

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.