whocalledus

I had a sandwich shop, and the city put up a wall blocking access to the driveway from the main road. They put a pamphlet in my mailbox that said, "Pure Shit," which instructed me to stop doing things like grinding up cats, posting obnoxious fliers on everyone's car windows, and stealing tomatoes out of people's yards.

There was a little box I could write in and mail back to request they restore access from the road. I made sure the shop wasn't doing any of those things, I cleaned it up a bit, and spoke with the Mayor. He said he didn't know why people would want to eat sandwiches, and my shop sucked. My form was mailed back with a "Denied" stamp and the same generic paper about how my shop is "Pure Shit."

"You're idiots." is a reasonable response of someone forced into a situation where their words have no effect, and nobody appears to be reading them. Why waste effort reasoning to those who refuse to listen or acknowledge what you say? Nobody said, "Your tomatoes are tainted because your supplier is a known fraudster." It just said, "Pure Shit."

Do they even have official widgets or affiliate programs? I linked to them because I wanted to share the link with people.

The term "backlink" isn't part of my vocabulary. I ignore Google ranking or external linking and focus on building useful or interesting things that adhere to my principles.

There was nothing to clean. Lots of websites link to whocalled.us, but I don't pay attention to them, and I certainly had nothing to do with any links to the site.

"Pure Spam If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, it means that Google has detected that some of your pages may be using techniques that are outside our Webmaster Guidelines. The site appears to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or other repeated or egregious violations of Google’s quality guidelines."

My reconsideration request was usually, "You're idiots."

I know what you mean, the site has also been blocked by AdSense and I've had to find the specific offending items to remove. But in those cases I think they provided me with some example links.

With "Pure Spam", they've determined you to be a black hat SEO spammer, so they do not share any information to help you evade the ban. This makes it difficult for the falsely accused to know how to fix their site.

I thought that's why they have manual reviews, but I've sent many reconsideration requests, and no person has ever responded with any specific information to help me know what to do.

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.

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?

I'll be the first one to critique whocalled.us, and tell you all the ways it could be much better. But that is a different issue than whether or not Google should completely remove it from its search results.

That page you linked to is mostly useless, and I would prefer to remove it from the index. But if I search that same phone number on Google, the #1 result is an empty page, "Be the first to comment:" (http://www.callhunter.com/numbers/2104495665).

There are plenty of pages that have a lot more information. Try this one (http://whocalled.us/lookup/6023888058). It is a messy site, with profanity, and plenty of noisy data. But how is that "Pure Spam" as Google insists?

I'll gladly reorganize the site if there's a significant problem with how it's structured. But Google has indexed this website in this same form for many years, and it continues to index its competitors. Why delete it now?

They might've detected something I have not found yet, but why not tell me so I can fix it? They provide me with no specifics about why whocalled.us is "Pure Spam".

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/: Site violates Google's quality guidelines February 14, 2015

Google received a reconsideration request from a site owner for http://whocalled.us/.

We've reviewed your site and we believe that 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/ 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.

Exactly. But if you search a telephone number you should be given new information, not an empty page for you to fill out. Otherwise we end up with the situation we have now, where there's endless empty pages in the search results.

I chose not to list any page without at least 1 reported phonecall or comment. Competitors instead listed empty pages, and that is why they beat whocalled.us to the top results in Google, and gained much more traffic.

I thought it was spammy to list empty pages, and could not bring myself to do it. But the sites that do that are still indexed, and whocalled.us is not.

    mysql whocalled -e 'select count(*) as empty 
    from sitemap s 
    left join comment c using(phonenumber) 
    left join phonecall p using(phonenumber) 
    where c.id is null and p.id is null'

    +-------+
    | empty |
    +-------+
    |     0 |
    +-------+

Which website? whocalled.us does not generate or list any URL that does not have information. Empty pages were never indexed by Google.

If you search Google for a random telephone number you will see a ton of empty sites who list every possible number. whocalled.us has never done that.