In a discussion on Twitter, Google’s Matt Cutts made clear that Google thinks that phone number pages are pure spam and that Google is going to remove more of these pages from the search results.
Act one: the complaint of a webmaster
On Twitter, the operator of a phone number website complained that his website was marked as ‘pure spam’ although the owner thought that it wasn’t.
Even after manual review, Google is still incorrectly penalizing my site as “pure spam”, without explaining why. @mattcutts
— Whocalld ☎ (@Whocalld) June 8, 2014
Act two: the reasoning of Google
Matt Cutts gave the operator five reasons why his website and phone number pages in general are spam:
- He said that many searchers don’t like results pages like this one and that he doesn’t see the value in web pages like this one.
- He said that things get worse when these phone number websites also use link spam. In this example, the phone number website used paid links (an example can be found at the bottom of this page).
- Matt Cutts said that the phone number website gave zero background info or context to differentiate the site from phone spam sites.
- In addition to the auto-generated number pages, the phone number website also contained auto-generated pages for words such as “locked” and many other words.
- The comments on the phone number website were take from another website.
Act three: may all be spam
After that, the owner of the phone number website said that Google should block all phone number websites. The owner also said that all phone number websites (including his) were spam.
Matt Cutts said that he was happy to ask a webspam analyst to do a quick sweep for newer phone number sites that are essentially keyword stuffing with numbers.
You can view the complete Twitter conversation here (saved as an image just in case that the phone website operator removes his tweets:
Epilogue
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