Web Design & Search agency near Tunbridge Wells (UK). The blogger, the MD, loves modded and modding Jap Cars, Dirty Electro House & all things Design and Search orientated!
We’ve seen a couple of instances lately whereby clients have been banned by Google. You’ll know you’re banned because if you type site:www.yourdomain.com into the Google search and nothing is shown as a result…you aren’t listed.
However, all is not all lost if this has happened to you. Sometimes, you could be the victim of an innocent mix up (as was the case with one of our clients). If you’ve just purchased a domain that’s been used before, the previous owner may have had some ‘baggage’ which has dragged the URL down. For example, if they’d been buying links or something else unethical and if Google spotted it, it could reflect on your website not now showing.
So what happens if you do get banned? Our recommendation is to firstly try and found out why. If you haven’t just bought the domain name, what else has happened lately? Have you linked to any external websites? It could be that the site you’ve linked to is ‘dodgy’ and you linking to them is effectively a vote for them. If you haven’t linked, it may be worth looking at your site as a normal user would. It may be that you have a trojan virus on the site. These get uploaded invisibly by nasty websites and if the trojan is recognised and spotted, it could lead to Google banning you for the sake of their own site visitors. You want to either crash your site and re-upload, or weed the pesky trojan out of your code.
Once you have identified your issue, you need to go to Google with cap in hand. We suggest registering your domain inside Google webmaster tools. It’s worth doing this anyway because Google will let you know what they know about you in here and if you take your SEO and search engine positions seriously, the information Google will share with you is priceless.
Within Webmaster tools, you can add a ‘verification meta tag’. You simply need to get your webmaster to insert this meta tag inside your homepage of yourwebsite. Once done, log back into webmaster tools and confirm this has been done. They then know you are associated with that website and you can request ‘reinclusion’ in their index.
To be reinserted, you need to tell Google what you know about your exclusion and what you have done to rectify it. All being well, Google will look upon your responsible efforts and re-include you. If you have done something silly - don’t hide it. Own up, say sorry, and learn from the experience…but don’t panic (yet!)
