7 Reasons Why Your Website Was Penalized or Banned by Google
I get this question asked occasionally: Why my website was penalized or banned by Google? So I thought to share some reasons. But before I do that I need to tell you how to distinguish between a penalized or a banned website.
Penalized Websites
Penalized sites are not exactly banned. They just do not rank for their own keywords. So if Balkhis was to be penalized then Balkhis would not rank for the keyword Balkhis on the first page at all, but it will rank for balkhis.com as a keyword. The site will still be in index when you type site:www.balkhis.com
Banned Websites
Banned websites will not rank for their own keywords, but they will not be indexed at all. So if your site is out of index then your website is banned.
Reasons why your website could be penalized or banned by google?
Cloaking – It is bad, don’t do it. Cloaking is basically when a reader see some other page and search engines see another thing.
Duplicate Content – Duplicate content on multiple pages.
Keyword Stuffing – When you stuff insane amount of keywords on your pages.
Buying Links – Buying links from irrelevant sites will get you in trouble.
Linking to Bad Sites – Any site that is not related to your niche is a bad site.
Hidden Text / Links – Sometimes free theme designers do this. They add links to the site and make it no display, so no one see it but the search engines. So make sure you check on that. This will get your site out of index.
Autobot Site – Sites that are generated by machines will kill your ranking because google is smart enough to detect them.
So now you have 7 reasons why your website can be penalized or banned by google. So don’t let that happen to your site.
Hey, I am Syed Balkhi, The guy who is behind Balkhis Inc. I entered the industry back in 2002 not knowing a single thing. I barely spoke English at that time. In the past six years, my language barrier has been eliminated. Aside from English, now I also speak html, and php. Along with the languages I have also managed to master a few arts. Art of web-designing started when I first entered. Messing around with photoshop, I learned how to create my first web design. Now I founded a web designing firm Uzzz Productions. After running numerous amount of websites in various niche, I have mastered the art of web-development. Now I am compiling a resource of what I already know, and what I am learning on this blog. This resource is to help me if I ever need a guide to look back to, and it is help my fellow webmasters.
Hi Balkhi,
You could also say sometimes Google wants to put you in a Sandbox too. The Sandbox concept is when Google places your site incognito for the a month or so from the search engine results.
I had this happen to one of my sites before and it wasn’t a pretty experience.
All the Best!
Regards,
Erwin Chua
Internet Marketing Advice & Smart List Building
w/ Alex Jeffreys & Erwin Chua! – Winning To Win!
http://winning2win.com
http://www.twitter.com/waywalker0101
Hi Erwin. I have read about the Sandbox. But most people say that once you enter the sandbox you remain there for about a year
Why would Google put you in a sandbox? I seems the same thing has happened to some of my site. Does anyone know the reaseon for this?
How did you get out of sandbox? What are the other characteristics of a sandboxed website?
This post is not about sandbox so I will not be answering the question in this post, but perhaps in my future posts
after going through ur post .. i think one of my site is in sandbox … will wait for urnext post on sandbox and ways to come out of it.
To get out of sandbox, you need to just keep up writing good content. The more good content you write, the faster you would get out of the sandbox.
The 7 reasons why you site was banned by google are the characteristics of a sandbox site.
And don’t forget about good backlinks
The only one that I can say that Google does not penalize you for is linking to a bad site. You have no control over who decides to link to your site even if it is related to another niche. I would just try to avoid making a habit of linking to unrelated niches.
I am going to tell you that if you link to bad neighborhood sites, you will be brought down. And if those sites link to you then you will be brought down. I know that a lot of websites had this issue. Any website that is not related to your niche is a bad site. Some people interlink their networks even though when they are not related. That is why their are rel tags. If you use rel=”me” then you are saved. I have seen that often times people list their own sites as sponsors on their other sites. Which then kills them in google ranking.
Thanks for your comment Donny. I really worry sometimes that if we are linking to an external site if it ‘dies’ without me noticing or something it will reflect poorly on us!
Sometimes it ponders me, what if we blogger want to use an image from flickr and include a link to that website?
To say that, they are unrelated to our blog. We can easily solve it with “no follow” tag, but not many people doing it.
Does that considered as unrelated link?
The recommended way would be to no follow that link. But I think since it is a source that you are using then it is ok because you are making a reference to that site.
It is like saying to prove my point on Balkhis, I reference another blog that is about selling books. It is ok because I am using it as a reference.
I am absolutely certain that if you use no follow you will be on the safe ground, and it is recommended.
Not that I need it for my small blog, but this is good information to store away for reference. Thank you.
Nice post. You really have to be careful these days.
Yea, good stuff. Why people get banned is one of the most commonly asked questions, glad you took the time to shed some light on it.
Another reason you can be penalized by Google is too many inbound links in a short period of time. This penalty can last for months.
Yes very true. When a site grows inbound links very quickly then google suspects buying links and then they question link integrity which results in a penalized site.
It is also possible sometimes to be moved from index just for one inner page despite others are still ranking well.
Yes it is possible to lose ranking for one page and others still rank. That is just normal day stuff. Another guy’s site just outpowered your page and therefore they rank higher.
Great post.
Your list demonstrates that basically the way to get your website or blog “banned” from Google is to try to “game” the search engines. All of these reasons result from trying to “get around” the first rule of pleasing the search engine gods which is creating good original content.
Create good content and focus on your readers. Search Engines will come to you.
Syed you are wrong about duplicate content being penalized or banned. Duplicate content is filtered out.
More info on webmaster world here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/33336.htm
Luke, You have mentioned a good point. When Matt individually review a site which was appealed then that statement would work. But since google does not have time to hand review each site. Duplicate content does kill. Now the issue that Matt was referring to was say if I write a post. Then some other blogger just replicates my post. Considering that I am an authority blogger, then google would see my article as authentic whereas the other blog would be ignored.
But If I write a blog post. And it is being shown on several pages on my blog. Then my individual post page is not getting enough strength. The strength is being divided between the two pages or even more. But if I keep just one page and disallow other pages in my robot.txt then my one page will rank higher.
So before my two pages were ranked 13 and 33 now my one page will be ranked 7. So I hope you get the idea. Some people might not look at this as a penalty, but I do so.
>>But If I write a blog post. And it is being shown on several pages on my blog. Then my individual post page is not getting enough strength. The strength is being divided between the two pages or even more. But if I keep just one page and disallow other pages in my robot.txt then my one page will rank higher.
Yes this is correct. It’s not penalized but the strength is diluted. =) You are right it is something to be avoided.
Some of the content on my wiki is generated/edited by bots. (Because we’re trying to gather some anayltic data, speed up what we were doing by hand, mass fixing things like capitalization.) Google won’t end up being penalizing us for that at some point will they?
Related to that, if you get removed from Google Ads, can that lead to banning from Google?
If it is not coming as spam then I don’t think google would ban you.
Answer to your second question is NO.
Hi there,
Thanks for sharing this… Now if anyone asked me
what’s the difference between penalizing and
banning, I’ll know how to explain.
But what scared me the most was that using a free
WP theme, having the designer put cloaked links
and giving you trouble all the while… you have
no idea what’s wrong.
Now, that’s scary. How do you detect that?
Asher
It happened to a good friend of mine owner of Aviva Directory. A few years back when I was designing directory designs left and right. Releasing free themes. There was another guy who was just releasing free themes. They were decent themes and Jeff sponsored them. The deal was designer does not get any credit on those themes. What he did was hid 3 extra links to his own sites in there. This designer got so popular for releasing good designs, but then his career was done after this.
Now to answer your question how do you detect it. Simply search the css file for nodisplay tag. Then search the html or php files for no display tags.
Some pretty interesting points there. I didn’t know that when Google penalizes you they don’t allow you to rank for your own keywords. That would really suck.
Yeah that is a very bad thing. Just look at John Chow’s site in google. It have 46k pages indexed but he doesn’t rank for his own keyword john chow.
I have never thought that the site, which is not related to my site’s niche may cause Google penalization. Thanks for pointing it out.
In my opinion the biggest reason is buying paid links, google is really taking that into high considerations and Massive link-building campaigns are also condemned!
How many links are considered massive?
In my experience that was just duplicate content. Even when it was re-wrote a little bit.
Thanks for sharing this important information. I think the big G may not be the most loved SE, but it’s good to understand what will get us penalized or banned. I’m sure no one likes that.
Peter Lee
[...] 7 Reasons Why Your Website was Penalized or Banned by Google [...]
I know that figuring out how Google sets up there SEO and Page ranking system is very had to figure out, so I really don’t expect a sustainable answer. If you have an online business and many of the pages are duplicate, but different item and some major wording. Would those pages or site get penalized?
So I guess we would rather get penalized then banned
Oh wait, that sounds so wrong still lol
These are all good reasons of why Google can ban your site and they should be avoided. How does Google know if the link you get is bought or not?
I think that Google does what it does very arbitrarily. If that makes sense. You can see some sites get hit and you wonder what it possibly could have been and other sites get rewarded that are blatently violating google webmaster guidelines.
Google makes no logical sense.
“Linking to bad sites” should definitely be avoided unless you are using nofollow on those links. If you have a website about cars and are linking to poker sites it is very obvious that those links are bought…right?
thanks for the information in this post but in my opinion if you work normal and don’t try to cheat search engines for fast ranking you will not have troubles but for who want fast rank they will banned .
I’ve just started out with some blogs in my passions. I was actually paying for this sort of info. My mind is boggling at the amount thats out here for free, so many blogs seem to be making a living of just information about blogging. Whats going to happen when everyone has a blog with thousands of backlinks? Is the number of niche’s infinite? surely there are only so many viable niches? What happens if someone posts the exact same comment on 1,000′s of blogs?
Many of my competitors buy links but i don’t. Their sites haven’t been penalized and rank above mine
.
It seems like Google isn’t on the ball with buying links!
when google ban some sites this because they selling links ” but to track this sites it take some time ” so you should wait and you will see your site get high rank better than your competitors
“Linking to bad sites” should be nofollow – thats definitely true.
I feel one of the best reason to bane your site in google is content if you have added duplicate content then google put your site in span box.
The lousy thing about getting penalized by Google is that they are often unwilling to explain why you were penalized. It is sometimes a guessing game as to which tactic they did not like. These days I try to keep everything legit so that I don’t have to worry about penalties.
Ive just recovered from a google penalty for buying text links. It was quite easy getting them to reconsider, I just went to all the site i bought a link on and told them to take it off. I took a note of these sites and sent the list to Google and told them I had bought links on the site but they have been taken off, and in a week they had unpenalized my site!
Not a nice experience though and hope it doesnt happen to anyone here anyway
Thanks for this. Worth a read. Should benifit and caution people, who might try to adapt wrong methods to hit Google.
To get out of sandbox, you need to just keep up writing good content. The more good content you write, the faster you would get out of the sandbox.