Banned By Google?
Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 3:06 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Google “slap” at affiliates. I receive several Internet Marketing newsletters and all they can talk about are the new Google rules.
It’s all very scary to me because, even though I’ve been doing Internet Marketing for over five years, I still feel like a newbie when it comes to the search engines and how they rank pages.
I search for my URL and my name every now and then to see how many times I’m listed in the results. I mostly do this to see where my articles are ending up, and to make sure no one is stealing my web pages. (And, yes, I still get a kick out of seeing my name in print!)
I recently discovered a few easy ways to tell if a site has been penalized or banned by Google that I want to share with you.
(Note: YouTypedThis.com refers to the URL you typed in to do your search)
- Do a search for your exact URL on Google. If you get the following response: “Sorry, no information is available for the URL YouTypedThis.com.”, then you’ve been penalized. This is Google’s kiss of death – it means you’ve been banned!
- Another message you might see is “Find web pages that contain the term YouTypedThis.com.” This is a little better, you haven’t been dropped from the index, but your rank has probably been lowered.
- This one: “If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking the following link: YouTypedThis.com” means that your site is not in the index, but it hasn’t been dropped or banned.
There is also a way to find out if you have suffered a duplicate content penalty. You will get an “omitted results” message when you search. To find out if this happened do the following:
Copy an exact and unique phrase from your page, without punctuation. Place quotes around it, and then insert it into a Google search box.
After you do the search, if your page doesn’t show in the results, check the bottom for a phrase similar to this “Repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
If your page shows up somewhere in the “omitted results,” then you’ve received a duplicate content penalty (which is still better than getting banned).
Hopefully you will not see any of the above, but at least now you are armed with the knowledge to fight back if you do.
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