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Analysis of Search Engine Bans

In the case of a Google ban or penalization the PageRank reported by the toolbar will often drop to zero for the home page and this will then percolate through to the rest of the site. However the toolbar PR is not particularly accurate and any results should be confirmed by checking rankings in search engines' results pages for target keywords and comparing with previous results.

Figure 1: Zero Page Rank

It should also be remembered that pages take some time, up to several months to acquire any PageRank and pages deep within a site may never gain enough PageRank to show in the toolbar.

Penalizations are the hardest to spot and are a good reason why any dubious SEO tactics should either be tried on a throwaway test domain or at least restricted to certain pages only. Assuming a global penalization hasn't been imposed it should be possible to identify which optimizations have caused the problem. Check inbound-links to see if any of the sites have been penalized or banned, this may be a clue. If a major link-partner has had its PageRank removed then the value of any inbound-links will also be zero. This will have a knock-on effect on your site. If you have outbound-links to any sites that may be suspect, a link-farm or your SEO company, check these as well. Your site may have been sucked into a larger ban.

Sometimes the problem is harder to pin down. A recent poster to a SEO forum wanted to know why his page ranked well with Yahoo! and MSN Search but after a year was still not present in Google for the same keywords. A check showed that he was not in the first 1000 results for his target keywords. However if the test was repeated using the allinanchor, allinurl, allintext or allintitle options, the site ranked #1. The site was also in the Google cache and had been visited recently and the Toolbar reported a PageRank of 5, higher than all the competitors. It is possible that some on-page optimizations had triggered the penalty, the keywords were heavily repeated in the title and within the content. The page also did not validate correctly. This shouldn't be a big problem but it arguably makes a search engine robot's job easier if the content is correct HTML. Another problem could have been the multiple inbound-links which originated from a trade directory although these on their own shouldn't cause a problem. The trade directory also ranked well in results pages.

An outright ban is easier to spot. For example when you type in a site's domain name the search engine should rank the site first. In the case of Google it gives a special results page:

Figure 2: Search on domain name with results

You can also use the Google cache command to see when the page was last visited by Google. As with PageRank if the site or page is new it may not yet have been visited by the indexer robot and so will not be present. What we are talking about is sites that were previously in the search engine's index and have vanished.

Figure 3: This site's home page is missing from the Google cache, maybe it has been banned?

Finally if a site has been dumped you will either not see it in the search engines results pages or you will get a special screen like this one for MSN Search.

Figure 4: There is no information about the site either

The "site:" operator is also useful to see how many pages the site still has in the search engine index.

site:www.traffic-power.com

Sometimes the causes of the problems are not obvious. Working with aggressive SEO businesses can lead to a ban for clients. Some unscrupulous SEO operators also use their client's sites to redirect traffic to their own website or to other clients. This may be through hidden links or doorway pages. This can have the knock on effect of getting the client banned even though they were unaware of these tactics.

Analysis of Search Engine Bans

See Also