After rare Google confirmation of on-site penalty, Natural News is back in Google’s index

In a rare move, Google confirmed that a publisher named Natural News was penalized and deindexed by the major search engine over Google webmaster guidelines violations. In fact, Google’s John Mueller specifically said the site was using sneaky mobile redirect, and once that is “cleaned up, the site can submit a reconsideration request through Search Console.”

It seems like they did clean it up and submitted a reconsideration request through Search Console, because the site is now back in the Google index. A site command now returns the home page and 440,000 other pages from the site.

It is incredibly rare for Google to confirm when a site is penalized to the press or public. But in this case, the site was claiming it was removed because it was pro-Trump. They started a White House petition against Google, and they are still encouraging people to sign the petition even after they have been restored to Google’s index.

The site said they would issue a statement at 11:00 a.m. Central time today on Google reincluding the site.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.