Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. My website is penalized from google with no message in GWT.

    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.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    5
    1033
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • WhoseNo
      WhoseNo last edited by

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • ThomasHarvey
        ThomasHarvey @WhoseNo last edited by

        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)

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • WhoseNo
          WhoseNo last edited by

          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.

          ThomasHarvey 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • effectdigital
            effectdigital last edited by

            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:

            • https://www.bing.com/search?q=whoseno.com

            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'

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • ThomasHarvey
              ThomasHarvey last edited by

              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?

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • Kahuna_Charles

                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_Charles
                1
              • moon-boots

                Google Pagination Changes

                What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s). Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first. The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1. I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it? Is there anything I'm missing?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots
                0
              • McTaggart

                Website copying in Tweets from Twitter

                Just noticed a web developer I work with has been copying tweets into the website - and these are displayed (and saved) one page at a time across hundreds of pages (this is so they can populate a twitter feed, I am told). How would you tackle this, now that the deed's been done? This is in Drupal. Your thoughts would be welcome as this is a new one to me. Thanks, Luke

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
                0
              • SolveWebMedia

                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 | | SolveWebMedia
                0
              • friendoffood

                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 | | friendoffood
                2
              • mycity4kids

                How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>

                Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids
                0
              • khi5

                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 | | khi5
                0
              • KateV

                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 | | KateV
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.