Title: In November Google completely removed whocalled.us from their search results.<p>It was the first site of its kind, created in 2005 for crowdsourced info about telemarketing numbers. There were scripts for people to utilize in their VoIP boxes, and it was a good honest site.<p>Google has been trying to weed out telephone spam in their results, and for some reason they deleted the original instead of the useless empty shell sites that spam every possible telephone number combination.<p>If I search &quot;whocalled.us&quot; on Google now I see #1 the Google+ page for the site, and #2 a WordPress spam page. They deleted whocalled.us with a &quot;Pure Spam&quot; manual action, and literally replaced it with <i>pure spam</i>.<p>whocalled.us has never used spam tactics. That is why copycats quickly beat it in terms of traffic. The first competitor used spammy SEO techniques, and is often the #1 result now for telephone number searches.<p>I&#x27;ve been making websites since before Google existed, and it feels like my ways are going extinct. Prior to this &quot;Pure Spam&quot; removal, there was a partial action for unnatural links. I was shocked that a search engine sent me a notice that my website would be penalized unless I contacted other websites to have them remove links to my site. Remove links? That is the whole point of the web!<p>It included some suggestions of &quot;spam&quot; sites with links to mine, and when I clicked one I saw someone&#x27;s personal blog with some links to their favorite sites. I don&#x27;t know what world this is, where a search engine tells a webmaster they need to contact a small-time blog owner to have them remove a link recommending your site, but it&#x27;s not mine.<p>To me this is still the World Wide Web, where little guys like me can play on the same field as global giants. But in reality, this is Google&#x27;s game now, and when they kick you off their field, there&#x27;s not much to do but sulk and go home.
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