In a first of its kind incident concerning telecom companies of Pakistan, Google has apparently penalized Telenor Pakistan by de-indexing its official website, i.e. telenor.com.pk, we have checked.
After we were tipped by multiple readers about the development some three days ago, we investigated and found out that Telenor Pakistan’s official website is not being shown in Google results, indicating that the website is penalized and not being shown for any keywords (related to Telenor Pakistan) .
It is usually very rare for a high-profile domain, especially one like telenor.com.pk, to get de-indexed by Google. But then again it’s Google, and predicting its moves isn’t as easy as one thinks.
We have checked the results and have reproduced it for our readers. You can check out the screen-grab below for the keyword search “Telenor Pakistan” on Google:
Ideally the results should have displayed “telenor.com.pk” as the top result. However, since the entire site has been de-indexed by the search giant, Google is displaying Facebook and Wikipedia pages as top results.
Not to mention, other Telenor domains, such as telenor.com and other TLDs, are not impacted by the penalty.
It is yet unclear why Telenor PK was de-indexed, but one possibility is that the domain may have violated Google TOS and was either blocked automatically through their AI algorithms or was banned manually by a Google engineer.
It must be noted that Google search is a major traffic source for internet websites. Like many others, telenor.com.pk was getting around 40% its traffic from Google (as per SimilarWeb).
All is not lost though. Once de-indexed, webmasters can fix any violations and request Google to re-consider the decision, which usually takes a few days and if the appeal is successful, the website is indexed again.
Ahsan Maykan, Director Consumer Segments and Products at Telenor Pakistan, when contacted, said that the team is aware of the issue and that they are working on resolving the problem.
Telenor said that its not a Google de-indexing related issue and is in fact an internal hiccup, that will be resolved with-in 24 hours.