I am banned from Google...Help!
What did you do to get banned? Can you get un-banned?
Yes! But first you need to know what you did to get
banned. Google will not tell you. A sure sign you have
been banned is that your website is missing a page
rank. By, that I mean the PR bar is Gray. That is usually
the first indication. To double check that, enter site:www.yoursite.com
into Google. Replace “yoursite.com' with your URL. If
it there are no pages indexed, that is a good sign your
site has been removed from Google (if your pages were
indexed beforehand). Also try link:www.yoursite.com
to see if your back links are still listed on Google.
If your site is banned they will be removed as well.
Read through the following list. If any of these ring
a bell, you should change them ASAP.
Spam:
Yes, people still do it whether it was intentional or
not. Some newcomers get confused in regard to legal,
productive ways to help boost their keyword percentage
and spam. The keyword tag with too many keywords or
keywords repeated too many times is spam. Comment tags
are for comments, not for keywords. Your description
tag is for a description. Yes, keywords should be in
it. However, it should not be blatantly 'chocked full'
of keywords. Insistently, the keywords in your description
should reflect that particular page, not your entire
site. Each page has its own keywords.
Another way to spam is to hide text. Creating text and
making it the same color as the background is spam.
Spam can sometimes be unintentional. If your site repeats
the same words over and over it can be seen as spam.
For example let’s say your site sells airline tickets.
Your site may state that you sell 'tickets to New York',
'tickets to San Francisco', 'tickets to Indiana', etc.
If you list all 50 states with the word “tickets' attached…that’s
spam!
Redirect:
If you own several domain names and have them redirect
to one, that is bad SEO. The only redirect allowed is
a 301 redirect. It should only be used to redirect an
old site to a newer site (old domain to a new domain).
This tells Google that it is a “permanent” re-direct.
Linking to bad neighbors:
A bad neighbor is a site that is considered to use Black
Hat SEO methods.
These can hurt you big time. Some examples of bad neighbors
are…
1 Free-for-all link farms
2 Adult websites
3 Gambling websites
4 Sites that have multiple categories to link to.
It is hard to undo links to bad neighbors. You can try
to check your back links and try to find the bad neighbors.
Then, try to see if they will remove your link. It usually
takes a large amount of bad links to hurt you. If you
stick to sites that are related to you and your industry,
you will likely be ok. Sometimes people search for an
easy way to generate one way links by turning to directories.
These can do a lot more bad than good. Plus, many are
automated, making removal next to impossible.
Duplicated Content:
This falls under the spam rule listed above. Basically,
if you create a page and then duplicate it throughout
your own site, it will hurt you. If your site is large,
you can use this free tool http://www.copyscape.com/
it will help you locate duplicated content on the web.
You won’t be penalized if your content (i.e. articles)
is syndicated to other sites, only if it is repeated
on the same domain. You can use similar content on pages.
Google does not tell us the percentage of content that
is considered to be spam so I would suggest you keep
it below 15%.
Robot.txt:
Sometimes this is inserted improperly. The robot.txt
file is a set of instructions for search engine spiders.
It tells them what to index or not to index. This file
resides in your root directory. If the tag is incorrect
it could prevent all search engines, not just Google,
from indexing your site. Or, in some cases, removing
it from the search engine index altogether. If inserted
properly you should be able to located it by http://www.yoursitehere.com/robots.txt
to validate that your robot file is in proper order.
Visit this site: http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi
for more utility options. For more info on how to properly
format your robot tag, visit http://www.seoconsultants.com/robots-text-file/
.
These are some of the major things to look out for.
If you have been banned from Google, go through this
list one problem at a time. After you have made the
corrections, contact Google. If you still have problems
you may need to start all over with a new domain.
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