Have I been banned by Google? Help!
It really has to be the sort of thing your worst nightmares are made of. Your company has spent ten times the gross domestic product of Bolivia on its website and a not insubstantial amount on promoting the site to the search engines.
Out of the blue, you receive a call from the sales director to tell you that sales conversions from the web site have fallen off a cliff. He wants to know what happened. His monthly bonus largely relies on it!
Ok, panic - we would - but only for a minute. Here we'll tell you how to tell if your pages have been banned by Google - or any other search engine, for that matter - and some ways of avoiding being banned.
You may actually find that you go into work one day and all signs of your web site have been completely removed from the Google index (or other search engine). Other times, your pages may slowly disappear from the indexes, with your home page disappearing last. This can be painful to observe.
If your site hasn't been too naughty, you may simply find it's been demoted to page 32 of the search results.
What do you do?
The first thing to do is to...run. No, hold on a minute. Let's first try to find out why the site has been...let's call it "penalised". Here's some things you can do if you've been banned or blacklisted:
Check your robots.txt file. Make sure nobody has changed this file to stop robots crawling your site. Also, check that there's no "NOINDEX" in the meta tags, which would exclude robots too.
Is your web server stable without much downtime? If not, get a new host or a new web server.
It may be that someone has copied your site and caused the ban. Google may have found duplicate sites and given your competitor the benefit of the doubt over who is the real owner. Search Google for a text string that is unique to your website. If you find a duplicate site, demand that whoever is responsible rectifies that matter immediately, whilst reporting this to Google in a professional manner.
Avoid spam - but what is "spam"? Here's some examples, sited by Google:
Hidden text or hidden links
Cloaking or sneaky redirects
Automated queries sent to Google
Pages loaded with irrelevant words
Pages, domains etc with duplicate content
Doorway pages or other "cookie clutter", such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
Avoid hidden text. Many years ago, many webmasters discovered that search engines promoted pages that contained many occurrences of relevant keywords or key phrases. The more the occurrences, the higher the ranking. The temptation to put white text on white backgrounds (or any same colour on colour) was too great.
You should definitely avoid these tricks. If you use HTML, the search engine spiders will compare the font colour with the background colour and penalise the pages if they appear the same in any area.
Avoid hidden links
Many webmasters produce "doorway" pages, designed to fool the search engines. They are not designed for your sites visitors and they would prefer the visitors not to see them. Because of this, the webmasters use hidden links to get the pages indexed by the spiders. They often do this by putting a link into a 1x1 pixel picture file, or make a full stop (.) a link.
Let's hope you're not banned at the moment, because you'll have to wait for our next article to read the concluding part, with some other techniques to avoid, and to find out how to play your Get Out Of Jail card and get back into the search engine indexes. If you can't wait, we suggest you contact us, and we'll do what we can to help.