Take the 2-minute tour ×

I recently started working for a new company and they have a lot of white label sites. Just last week I checked Google Webmaster Tools for one of our bigger in-house white label sites (one we personally run) and discovered that Google removed it from the index, though we never got a message in Webmaster Tools. I also performed a site:operator search just to be sure and it definitely isn't listed anymore.

Finding out a little bit more about the site, I discovered it was changed to pretty much be an exact match of our main site and that it used to have canonical tags but they were removed. Not sure why.

I don't have a lot of experience with white labels, so I guess this is more of a general help question, though I was specifically wondering if putting back the canonical tags that were previously removed would be enough.

share|improve this question
Is the site that is removed a copy of another site? Can it be considered the original site that the branded sites are mirroring? White label sites are essentially pure duplicate content and an ideal candidate for removal from Google's index. –  John Conde Jan 17 at 20:40
The white label site that was removed from the index isn't the original branded site. It was originally differentiated from the main branded site but I'm pretty sure it was turned into a pure copy. The thing is we had canonical tags pointing back to original website that it was copied from and it seemed like that might have been working originally. –  user35306 Jan 17 at 21:24
If that's a pure copy then it will stay removed from the index. There is no point in having two copies of the exact same thing on the Internet, is there? What would be the purpose really? –  Alexis Wilke Jan 19 at 4:05
If you used rel=canonical to point to the main site, then it's working as expected: the rel=canonical tells Google to only index the main site. That's a good way of keeping separate sites up, and a good way of making sure that search engines focus on your main site instead of getting confused by the copies. –  John Mueller Jan 21 at 21:27
I really appreciate the help guys. But just so you are all aware, I discovered that the problem was actually something else. The canonical issues didn't help but that doesn't seem to be the real problem. Still, thanks again. –  user35306 Jan 23 at 1:01

1 Answer 1


That's most likely why the site was removed. As Google states here:


Once the canonical links were removed, Google might have thought this exact matching copy of your main site was a deliberate attempt to manipulate search results:


You can try adding the canonical links back to the site, then add it to Google Webmaster Tools (if not already) and resubmit it using the Fetch as Google tool. It might take some time before it's re-indexed...

However, your best bet would be to significantly modify the content of the site first so that Google would no longer consider it to be a duplicate of your main site.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


