If you, or your search engine optimizer, has been very, very bad, unethical, and violated Webmaster Guidelines, your site can be banned from organic search results. Nobody’s going to send you a warning or a telegram when the deed is done. Instead, your site will suddenly just disappear—poof!—from organic results. In short order, web traffic will follow suit.
Getting banned from search engine results turns a website into the proverbial tree falling in the proverbial woods. It’s there. But no one can “hear” it. Or, find it, either.
Although outright, full-scale bans are hardly an everyday occurrence, they can and do happen, even to major brands. In 2006, BMW’s German sites were banned from Google—which, in turn, resulted in a PR fallout. Doorway pages were the culprit. Nicht gut! The offending pages had been up for a couple of years, but after the company was caught, the sites were gone from Google’s results in a couple of minutes—and fully within reason. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines clearly state: “If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or ‘throwaway’ domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index.”
Sites can be banned for all sorts of reasons, most of them outlined in this section of the book. Whether you were behind the misdeeds that resulted in removal from search results or whether it was an unethical outside SEO who precipitated the ban, getting back in is your problem. You are responsible for a search consultant’s actions in the eyes of the search engines.
Getting back in won’t be easy. But it’s possible, though it’s often very time consuming and expensive. The idea, of course, is not to get banned or penalized by the search engines in any way in the first place.
If you think you’ve been banned because your site isn’t showing up in search results, the first step is to ensure it really is banned. Try Google first. Go to the search engine and type “site:www.domain.com” and “site:domain.com” (with and without the www; and of course, use the proper suffix, such as .net, .org, and so on). If the result is “Your search - site:www.domain.com - did not match any documents,” the site most likely is banned by Google.
If the domain name doesn’t appear in search results as a stand-alone domain, or shows up in boldface type on other sites, there’s likely a problem with the domain name, with the robots.txt file, or with redirects to the site.
Next, try Google’s Webmaster Tools site. A banned site won’t show up in the Diagnostics/Web Crawl section, nor will it be visible in the Links/Pages section data. Unless the site is very new and hasn’t yet been indexed, or ownership of the domain name has expired, you’ve likely got a problem. The search engines aren’t going to warn you if they find a problem with your site—no e-mail, telegrams, or snail mail. They have absolute and final authority over what sites they include in their indices and what sites they don’t. Remember, you don’t have an absolute right to appear in search engine results.
If you’ve determined that you do have a problem, review Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for potential violations. If you’re absolutely certain you haven’t broken any of the rules, you can submit a re-inclusion request by signing into your Google Webmaster Tools account. Navigate to the Removed Content tab and click “re-include” next to the content you want to get back into the index. Similarly, you can visit Yahoo!’s Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Center to determine if a site is in those indices as well.
Now, let’s look at the worst-case scenario: You were banned. Now what?
Most likely, you have one shot—one—to get back into Google’s good graces. (We’ll talk Google here, but this advice applies to all the Big Three search engines.) So, some house cleaning is in order. And that house better be spic and span—absolutely, impeccably meticulous—before you prostrate yourself before Google, hat in hand, and humbly request re-inclusion in their index. When you are ready to send that e-mail, send it to [email protected] with the subject line “Re-inclusion Request.”
After that e-mail is sent, be prepared to wait. It could be three months or longer before Google gets to your case in their queue. And when they do get to it, they’re going to examine virtually every page of that site with a fine-tooth comb. If they find fault, you’re going to go back to the end of that list before you’ll be checked again.
This is why the Big Cleanup is so critically important. Not a crumb can remain in even the most remote corner. Sites that are major violators of Google’s policies might find that it’s easier, faster, and cheaper to rebuild from scratch rather than to seek out and fix every violation of Google’s guidelines.
If you rely on search engine traffic for leads, sales, or any sort of revenues, getting banned is a hole you don’t want to go into. So stay on the good side of the Webmaster Guidelines!