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Banned by Google - What Can You Do?

by
Jim Bruce
founder: Ristvin Marketing


You just found out that your website has been banned by Google. What are the steps you need to take to get back in their graces? Well, I have to tell you that it will take a lot of effort and time on your part to get back in. Let's take a look at how you should proceed to accomplish your goals.

Check the Factors Outside Your Control First

The first step you should take is to access Why you were de-listed. There can be a number of reasons why you fell from Googles grace. Before you kick yourself for doing something wrong, take a look at the influences outside of your control that may have led to your website being banned. I recently came to the aid of a webmaster that had a website that had been banned and couldn't figure out what he did wrong.

Upon investigating his situation, I found out that he hosted his site through a friend who owned a small, local hosting company. The hosting company had moved locations to a building that was more suited to their needs. In doing so, they experienced a downtime period while they were moving their servers. The hosting company told me that they had many servers and that none had been down for more than a half a day. The reality proved that they were all moved in the same truck and that the downtime was more like a week.

In a scenario such as this, Google's bot probably visited the site and found it was no longer there. But they know that servers crash and have other problems, so they que another bot to visit in a couple days to see if this was a temporary problem. In this case, the site was still not found and the Google algorithms took the site out of the index, assuming they were no longer in business and to save precious space in their database. Don't always assume the problem is yours. Be sure to check those factors you have no influence over.

Check for Broken Links in Your Website

Another website that was banned by Google that I worked with had just undergone a remake. A new webmaster had taken over the duties of maintaining the website and decided to place his mark on the site by re-designing it. He re-designed the homepage and put it up on the server while taking down all the old pages at the same time. Duties at work kept him from putting up new back pages for over six months.

During that period, the homepage sat there with all the links to other pages leading nowhere. Google visited the site to find only the homepage and a dozen or so broken links leading to 404 errors. The site never grew and the links remained broken. Eventually the site was de-listed and banned by Google. It's too bad because the previous webmaster had built the site up and it had an overall PageRank of 4 when the new webmaster took over and made his changes.

The site now is back to its original size with all the links active. The webmaster has asked for re-inclusion but Google has yet to respond. This website has suffered a year now without any traffic being sent by Google just because it contained an abnormal amount of broken links that were not addressed for too long a period.

Check for Bad Coding That leads to a Search Engine Unfriendly Site

Another website I worked with had hired the nephew of the boss to design their website. The nephew was the logical choice as he was inexpensive and had taken a course in college on website design. At first glance, they had a professional, nice looking website. I was impressed by its appearance. But then I looked at the coding.

What a garbled mess! It turns out that the WYSIWYG in Dreamweaver was used to design and make the site. The nephew never learned HTML coding in his college course. He learned the "point-and-shoot" method of web design. He confessed to me that his instructor had told the class that anyone can make a website and you don't even need to know HTML. The WYSIWYG will do it all for you.

The problem with this website was that the WYSIWYG had put in a lot of unnecessary, spammy code in the background. Not only that, the nephew had made a fancy, drop-down navigation bar and it was all done in javascript which the search engines couldn't read. This left the spiders stranded on the homepage.

To compound the issue, the nephew had never been taught the importance of the title tag and meta description tags. Every page had the same title and no descriptions. The search engines were clueless as to what the website was all about. The page URLs were page1, page2, etc. They were of no use to the search engines in determining the theme of the website.

Poor overall HTML code, javascript navigation, and lack of understanding of website basics led this website to being banned by Google. I cleaned the website code up, made the navigation search engine friendly, based each of the back pages on a central keyword and named, titled, and wrote descriptions based on these keywords and the site petitioned Google for re-inclusion. It took seven months, but the website is now found in Google searches and has gained a PageRank of 2.

Duplicate Content - A mistake that I've even made

Yes, I even made this mistake back in my early days on the internet and it came back to haunt me when Google put in place their duplicate content filter. My very first website was a free hosted website. About a year later, I decided to pay for hosting and become a true dotcom site. My problem was that I transferred my pages over to my dotcom site without taking down my old freebie one.

Back in those days, it really didn't matter. The search engines were in their infant stage and no one was on the prowl to find duplicate content. There are some minor search engines today that simply don't care. But Google pioneered the duplicate content filter and my website was soon banned as the freebie site had been put up first and my dotcom site was penalized for this plagiarism.

Duplicate content is still one of the main reason that web pages and websites are banned by Google. Duplicate content comes from many sources. Out-right plagiarism and stealing content, word-for-word publishing articles without adding comments, etc. to make them unique, and moving websites and leaving the old domains intact or without a re-direct to the new site. Always be sure that your content is original and unique.

Black Hat SEO Techniques

Black Hat Seo is the spamming that Google is on a constant outlook for. I would never tell anyone to use these techniques. They may lead to increased search engine traffic initially, but in the long run, you will find you are constantly abandoning domains and having to start over. It's much better to think in the long term and apply the search engine optimization practices the keep your website going.

Petitioning for Re-inclusion

Regardless of why your website has been banned, you have two roads you can take. First, you can abandon the domain entirely. This is almost a must if you have been applying "black hat SEO" techniques to gain favorable rankings with the search engines. But, I see this as a last resort if it is a site that has lots of traffic and is a revenue generator.

Secondly, you can fix the problem(s) and petition for re-inclusion into the Google index. This can be done by finding the re-inclusion form in the webmaster tools, fill it out and submit it. The review of your website is done by a human being so make sure everything is in order.

We now offer a FREE Search Engine Optimization Whitepaper Report explaining SEO and what you need to do to your website to properly prepare it for the highest search engine rankings. Receive it by filling out and submitting the following form:

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