<story><title>Google undeleted whocalled.us after a front page article on Hacker News</title><text>Last week I posted on HN that &amp;#x27;Google deleted whocalled.us for “Pure Spam” and replaced it with spam&amp;#x27; (https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=9050343).&lt;p&gt;I appreciated reading your thoughts, and it made me feel better because the worst part of it all was feeling like nobody could hear my protests that they made a mistake.&lt;p&gt;I made 8 reconsideration requests, which are messages you send Google to ask for a human to manually review the penalty. All of them were denied with the same automated response.&lt;p&gt;It did not feel like any humans actually read or thought about the situation, so I felt voiceless.&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you make a public scene, a large corporation will often notice, and look closer at that individual&amp;#x27;s issue. I think that&amp;#x27;s what happened in this case.&lt;p&gt;I happened to notice today that whocalled.us was back in Google, and the &amp;quot;Pure Spam&amp;quot; manual action had disappeared. There was no notice or explanation, and it feels like someone at Google saw my post, and quietly fixed it.&lt;p&gt;I thought it was important to notify HN about this.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know how to feel about this. I already removed AdSense from the site, and gave up on it. From a shortsighted view, I should be happy, and thank Google.&lt;p&gt;But this experience showed me that Google has more power over my website than I do.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>compbio</author><text>I saw your previous post and could not find egregious blackhat SEO stuff. The backlink profile was not too healthy though, with around 250 domains responsible for over 7000 backlinks. You said you got a spam warning on Google Webmaster Tools: These penalties are hardly ever permanent.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; As usual, if you make a public scene, a large corporation will often notice, and look closer at that individual&amp;#x27;s issue. I think that&amp;#x27;s what happened in this case.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I made 8 reconsideration requests .. all of them were denied.&lt;p&gt;Probably because you did not show a good will effort to clean up your act. At least you do not tell us what were the contents of these reconsideration requests. For all we know it was: &amp;quot;Reconsider me!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;From your previous post I gather that you were heavily annoyed with the unnatural links actions and warnings. Instead of cleaning up your act for Google you focused on a suggested unnatural link to claim it was all BS.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; As usual, if you make a public scene, a large corporation will often notice, and look closer at that individual&amp;#x27;s issue. I think that&amp;#x27;s what happened in this case.&lt;p&gt;I do think that the people at Google notice a prominent post on HackerNews. But I do not think that they manually removed a spam penalty to avoid bad publicity. If anything: allowing spammy sites in the index without even a slap on the wrist is not good for publicity at all (and very visible to the users). I think the pre-set penalty period was over, or a recrawl found a cleaner site.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; But this experience showed me that Google has more power over my website than I do.&lt;p&gt;Google has more power over their search engine index than you do. You are free to do whatever you want to do with your website.&lt;p&gt;I do have a question: The DuckDuckGo widget you had on your site (now changed to a general link), was that an official widget? Did money exchange hands for placing such a widget&amp;#x2F;link on every page of your site? I am wondering why a site-wide link to a commercial page is not &amp;#x27;nofollow&amp;#x27;-ed, and if that may have brought you unwanted quality guidelines attention.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google undeleted whocalled.us after a front page article on Hacker News</title><text>Last week I posted on HN that &amp;#x27;Google deleted whocalled.us for “Pure Spam” and replaced it with spam&amp;#x27; (https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=9050343).&lt;p&gt;I appreciated reading your thoughts, and it made me feel better because the worst part of it all was feeling like nobody could hear my protests that they made a mistake.&lt;p&gt;I made 8 reconsideration requests, which are messages you send Google to ask for a human to manually review the penalty. All of them were denied with the same automated response.&lt;p&gt;It did not feel like any humans actually read or thought about the situation, so I felt voiceless.&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you make a public scene, a large corporation will often notice, and look closer at that individual&amp;#x27;s issue. I think that&amp;#x27;s what happened in this case.&lt;p&gt;I happened to notice today that whocalled.us was back in Google, and the &amp;quot;Pure Spam&amp;quot; manual action had disappeared. There was no notice or explanation, and it feels like someone at Google saw my post, and quietly fixed it.&lt;p&gt;I thought it was important to notify HN about this.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know how to feel about this. I already removed AdSense from the site, and gave up on it. From a shortsighted view, I should be happy, and thank Google.&lt;p&gt;But this experience showed me that Google has more power over my website than I do.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>geetee</author><text>Fixing mistakes without accepting blame or acknowledging the error always bothers me. Does it stem from the fear of a lawsuit-happy society, or embarrassment?</text></comment>