: Our company's white label site was removed from Google's search index, would canonicalization help? I recently started working for a new company and they have a lot of white label sites. Just

@Voss4911412

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.


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


Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content
within or across domains that either completely match other content or
are appreciably similar.


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:


In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may
be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users,
we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of
the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer,
or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which
case it will no longer appear in 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.

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