Signs a Site Is Banned from the Search Engines

Now that we’ve covered the Google Sandbox, how will you know you are in the sandbox and not banned or penalized?

Understandably, there is no hard and fast rule. The search engines certainly don’t want to reveal what the true limits and boundaries truly are or SEOs would end up pushing the limits to the max. It is this grey area that they allow people to muddle around in. Usually, the limits are only known after the fact.

Marcela De Vivo wrote a two-parter article over at Search Engine Watch [part 1 here] and [part 2 here] that explains some of the possibilities you should check for before assuming the worst. She also offers some issues to correct if it is a ban.

A banned website will not show in the search engine results, it will be completely de-listed from the search engine index. If you have the Google Toolbar installed, you might also see a grey PageRank bar.

Some webmasters believe that having no Google PageRank is an indication that they are penalized or banned. This is simply not true in all cases.

Having no Google PageRank could indicate the site:

Is new. It did not get the inbound links in time to make the Google PageRank update.

Doesn’t have any quality inbound links. It may have many PageRank zero sites pointing to the site or the inbound links are placed on pages with low quality link pages.

Here are some quick steps to determine if a site has been banned or penalized:

1. Check whether the search engine has cached your site. In Google, enter “cache:http://www.yoursite.com” (without the double quotes) and it returns none.

2. Your site was previously listed in the search engine index but is nowhere listed in the index today. You perform a search using “site:www.yoursite.com” (again without the double quotes) in the search box (works for Yahoo, Google, and MSN) or toolbar and see no results shown or only the homepage.

3. Check to see if the Google PageRank bar is greyed instead of the normal white or with the red bar fill.

4. If you run the site, did you build too many links to the site at once, alerting the search engine reps to your activity? You may also have linked inadvertently to a bad neighborhood with aggressive reciprocal link building activity. Check all the links in your links pages and make sure you didn’t link to any link farms, free-for-all (FFA) sites, or cloaked pages. If you are not sure what this is, check out the article on bad neighborhoods.

If your site is not listed in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and you have not promoted the site any, start building some inbound links to draw the search engine spiders to your site. If the search engine doesn’t know your site exists, how can it index it? The web is made of links and that is what keeps us all connected. These links can come from press releases, posting in relevant forums and blogs (be careful not to spam), and not necessarily just from reciprocal linking or link purchasing.