Lately I had been researching about Google search ban (dropped from the index), how to identify and get unbanned.
One of my site, Analytic Insight had not appear in Google’s index. In the beginning, I thought it was just a delay. Then I think something must be wrong.
(UPDATE: After writing this, I checked again, it is now appearing in the index. False alarm but a good learning experience.)
Another of my site, Free Biz Ware already appears in the index and it was launched later.
I actually did not do much SEO for both sites. Google sitemap was submitted for both.
Looking at Google’s official webmaster Help Center did not yield much information
- Why isn’t my site included in the index?
- Why has my site disappeared from the index?
- How can I get my site included in the index?
- Why hasn’t my site been crawled yet?
- Webmaster Guidelines
What went wrong?
How to identify a Google Search ban?
There isn’t a fail proof way to be sure. However the following will tell you that a site is indeed not included in the search index.
-
Search for you domain name example.com returns
Sorry, no information is available for the URL -
Search for site:example.com returns
Your search – site:example.com – did not match any documents. -
Search for link:example.com returns no result
-
If you use Google Sitemaps, you will see the following in the Indexing summary
No pages from your site are currently included in Google’s index. -
If you use Google Toolbar, you will see a gray bar where it usually shows the PageRank
So what are the common reason that a site does not appear in Google’s index? This was what I found out
- Server was down when googlebot visits to index the site.
- Faulty robots.txt file.
robots.txt file written or set up incorrectly could inadvertently block googlebot from the site site altogether. -
Technical issues prevented googlebot from indexing the site. These include
- improper server redirect
-
faulty URL structure, site navigation, cross linking
-
password protection
-
Violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Know what you can and cannot do. Be sure that ‘EO experts’ you hire are doing the right thing. -
Finally it could can simply be due to hiccup of the Google spider. Sometimes things go wrong.
What to do?
What can you do if you think you are banned?
Remember that Google “usually doesn’t confirm or deny whether a company has been removed from our index“
Matt Cutts has guidelines on how to request a reinclusion.
A lot of information floating around suggest emailing to help@google.com. However Matt suggested that you should go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py
In any case, it appears that you have nothing to fear if you do nothing wrong.
References:
- Banned By Google? Dealing With A Google Ban
- Confirming a penalty, the closest to official word one might get.
- How To Determine If Your Site Is Banned In Google
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