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 toget banned. Google will not tell you. A sure sign you have been banned is that your web site is missinga page rank. By, that I mean the PR bar is Gray. That is usually the first indication. To double checkthat, enter site:www.yoursite.com into Google. Replace "yoursite.com" with your URL. If it there areno pages indexed, that is a good sign your site has been removed from Google (if your pages were indexedbeforehand). Also try link:www.yoursite.com to see if your back links are still listed on Google. Ifyour 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 keywordsor keywords repeated too many times is spam. Comment tags are for comments, not for keywords. Your descriptiontag is for a description. Yes, keywords should be in it. However, it should not be blatantly "chockedfull" 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 isspam. Spam can sometimes be unintentional. If your site repeats the same words over and over it can beseen as spam. For example let's say your site sells airline tickets. Your site may state that you sell "ticketsto New York", "tickets to San Francisco", "tickets to Indiana", etc. If you list all 50 states with theword "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 allowedis a 301 redirect. It should only be used to redirect an old site to a newer site (old domain to a newdomain). 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 web sites
3 Gambling web sites
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 badneighbors. Then, try to see if they will remove your link. It usually takes a large amount of bad linksto 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 cando 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 throughoutyour own site, it will hurt you. If your site is large, you can use this free tool copyscape.com itwill 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 contenton pages. Google does not tell us the percentage of content that is considered to be spam so I wouldsuggest you keep it below 15%.
Robot,txt:
Sometimes this is inserted improperly. The robot.txt file is a set of instructions for search enginespiders. It tells them what to index or not to index. This file resides in your root directory. If thetag is incorrect it could prevent all search engines, not just Google, from indexing your site. Or, insome cases, removing it from the search engine index altogether. If inserted properly you should be ableto located it by http://www.yoursitehere.com/robots.txt to validate that your robot file is in properorder. Visit this site: searchengineworld.com formore utility options. For more info on how to properly format your robot tag, visit seoconsultants.com.
These are some of the major things to look out for. If you have been banned from Google, go through thislist one problem at a time. After you have made the corrections, contact Google. If you still have problemsyou may need to start all over with a new domain.
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