Google Banning and Penalties

[komodo9]

div class="entry" pI just got into an SEO discussion about someone’s site who was banned by Google. Looking back over it, my lastreply might be helpful to others, so I decided to post it here./ppstrongQ. Help! All my traffic from Google has stopped and I lost my Pagerank. Am I banned or penalized?/strong/ppstrongA. /strongbrIf you’ve lost 100% of your traffic (not a single hit from Google), andyou’ve lost your Pagerank, you’re not penalized (and sandboxed)… you’rebanned. If you’re still unsure, later in this article I give a way totest without a doubt if you’re banned or penalized./ppGoogle has various levels of punishment, based on your offense. Ifthey think it’s innocent or accidental, they penalize you. If theythink you did it on purpose trying to cheat the system, they ban you./ppNow the bad news. After a website is banned from Google it’s removedfrom the index completely and will never be readded. Penalized sitesare still in the index, but much lower in the result pages. There is noappeal process for a banned or penalized site (it’s not a judicialsystem- if Google giveith, Google can also taketh away)./ppNow, no one is completely sure how Google functions. They onlypublish some of their inner-workings, and the rest are still secret. Adomain that is issued a ban by Google will never be reincluded in theindex again as long as it’s registered, however there is speculationthat if a domain is not renewed, and a period of X months or yearspass, a new person registering the domain will not suffer the samepenalty (ie, the ban on that domain is lifted), however that doesn’thelp you much. Also there’s speculation that Google does not just banthe domain, but also the entire IP address, however I have my personaldoubts about this because of shared hosting, however I could see themwatching it more closely./ppYou can check to see if your domain is banned from the Google indexby searching for your entire domain as a query, and if it had PR at anypoint in time (even 0), it will always return. If there are no results,but you’ve been in Google before, they didn’t forget about you… you’vebeen banned. Check your site here: a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=www.mywebsite.com]Google Link/a/ppOn that note, I’d recommend what I said above. Cut your losses,gather your content (except what caused you to be banned, usuallymaterial that tries to manipulate or fool Googlebot’s keyworddetection), register a brand new domain name, and begin building again.Another point though, is before I recommended setting up a 301redirection on your old domain, and while it is still needed for othersearch engines, it will do nothing with Google. When Googlebot iscrawling another site and sees a link to your old domain, it won’t evenbother following it (to get the redirect), because it’ll realize thatdomain is banned and stop right there… so in Google, you WILL lose allyour backlinks when you setup your new site. There is no way to avoidthis, except tracing as many of the high PR links as you can find, andemailing the webmasters asking them to change where their link ispointing to. However don’t get me wrong, if you do not setup the 301redirect, the other search engines will be confused as well and you’llalso lose their traffic (so do it)./ppSorry about this, but hopefully you understand the situation now andcan begin rebuilding to get back on your feet as quickly as possible.Good luck with everything!/ppuOther Helpful Replies in the Discussion/u/ppemEarlier in the conversation, they thought their website was simply penalized. Here was my reply on sandboxing and penalties:/em/ppSorry to hear about that. Average penalized site takes about 6months to come out of the sandbox. Granted some are less, but some arealso more./ppI’d actually recommend grabbing a different domain, copying overyour content, and begin rebranding. Setup a 301 permanent redirect onyour domain so you still retain credit for all your links and it bleedsPR, but you have a clean name to work with./ppGood luck!/ppemAnd they asked “that would be if it was a new domain right ? . .less than 2 years registered”, so I clarify the “new domain sandbox”confusion:/em/ppNo, the sandbox has nothing to do with a new domain./ppWhen a website gets penalized for some reason, it goes to the sandbox where it comes up lower on the SERPs./ppWhen a domain is new, it simply does not have pagerank. It can go toPR5 the next week with enough inbound links, but a penalized site inthe sandbox cannot get PR again (and high placement in SERPs) until thepenality is lifted./ppstrongHope that helped!br/strong/p /divbrTrackback Link: a href="http://www.harrymaugans.com/2006/04/18/help-my-website-was-banned-by-google/"http://www.harrymaugans.com/2006/04/...by-google//abr

[mondine]

Good article. Very informative.
You'll want to fix your trackback link, though. It's got a line break stuck on the end. (That seems to happen quite a bit, lately.)

[crush123]

thanks the article is very helpful.
it has cleared much of my confusion about penalty and ban of sites.

[komodo9]

Originally Posted by mondine

Good article. Very informative.
You'll want to fix your trackback link, though. It's got a line break stuck on the end. (That seems to happen quite a bit, lately.)

Ah, thank you.

I've noticed the rich text editor on this site is pretty buggy. =/

Glad it helped you guys.

[IamTheKing9]

You know, this might come in helpful when I make a site of my own. Thanks for such a good article.