Are You Banned or Deindexed?
Posted: August 25th, 2008
Getting your domain banned and complete website deindexed is by far the worse penalty that a search engine can impose on your website. Such an occurrence instantly drops search traffic to zero, and drags down leads and revenues along with it. A banned website effectively does not exist in the eyes of search engines, meaning that a deindexed website will be out of sight to searchers, and out of the minds of potential customers!
So how can we tell whether our domain is actually banned, or whether we just really suck at search engine optimization (newly registered domains are exempt from this)?
Checking for a Ban
1) Type "domain.com" and "www.domain.com" (sans the quotation marks) into the query field of Google, Yahoo, or Live (MSN). If pages from your domain show up in the search results, then congratulations on not being banned. However, shame on you and your nonexistent SEO skills (just kidding).
2) Type "site:domain.com" and "site:www.domain.com" into the query field for Google or Yahoo, and "url:domain.com" if you’re checking in Live Search. If something shows up other than "…did not match any documents," then you’re in the clear.
3) Check your website in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Live Search Webmaster Center . Even if your website isn’t fully deindexed you can gather useful crawling and indexing information about your site.
Precursors of a Deindexed Website
1) Your website is so poorly built and the structure is so horrendously messy that spiders avoid your site like the plague, or simply don’t understand it, like why Britney shaved her head.
2) You neglect to follow webmaster guidelines and employ black hat or gray hat SEO methods.
3) You like to play around with robots.txt. The little robots.txt is like the gatekeeper of your site, either allowing or denying access to different user agents out there.
Tags: Google, indexing, Live Search, search traffic, SEO, tools, Yahoo
Great tip! Luckily, I do not fall into this category.
Glad to hear it. I have yet to see this happen to any of the sites I’ve ever worked on.
I was submitting to directories today and found notices on three of them that they had been banned. My guess is because they provide links for so many sites, Google has classified them as link farms.
great composition
I would say, your articles are very informative with the eye opener. very good, Thanks, Suzana
[...] public links >> livesearch Are You Banned or Deindexed? Saved by ProfLupin on Thu 23-4-2009 Social Bookmarking Updates Saved by sailormoongirl2 on Wed [...]
Useful information here. Many people are wondering if they have lost their websites.
Hi People!!! I’m looking for some support. Yahoo has banned my site unfairly without previous warning or something. Many webmaster are frustrated with they way that Yahoo applies their guidelines. I opened some threat’s in their Yahoo Site Explorer Forum asking for help. After 3 months and several messages they answered me something that I’m not agree. I told them what they don’t want to hear.
I’d like that you please take a read at it, if you’re agree with what I’m saying to Yahoo, please give me some support in the thread. Yahoo uses to ban websites without any consent, and I think this isn’t fear. Please, I’m just asking for some support in the thread.
Here is the thread url: http://suggestions.yahoo.com/detail/?prop=SiteExplorer&fid=151278
Thanks to everybody.