How to Tell if You've Been Banned from Google?

[TheOtherOne]

My site has had a consistent pagerank of 5 for over a year and I've been listed with google for over four years but suddenly two days ago I noticed on my google toolbar that my pagerank went to zero and whenever I search for my domain I get a "Sorry, no information is available for the URL" message.

I've been completely wiped out of Google. I've never done anything to try and manipulate my search ranking. I just run a decent site and get a few visitors because of it. I'm listed at dmoz.org and wikipedia.org even put a link to me in their article covering the subject my site is about.

If I do a search for "example.com" (with the quotes), I'll get over 9,000 results. All of which are OTHER websites with just links to me but a direct link to my actual url is nowhere to be found.

Is there a way to tell if they've banned me for some reason or is it possible that a competitor can have you removed from Google's listings?

[edited by: ciml at 10:12 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2005]
[edit reason] No real domains in examples please. [/edit]

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Dropped site checklist.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[TheOtherOne]

Thanks. I went through that checklist and can't find anything that I would think could really have got me banned. I guess I just resubmit to google and hope they take me back?

I do kind of use a single site-wide template but the content is still different on every page and it's been this way since I started the website.

There are a number of other sites that I've found in the search engines who have copied my meta description and site title on pages that look like they've been setup as spam with ugly URL's and everything. There are also a large number of directory type sites that I've found who are linking to me. I get what look like spam e-mail requests almost every day from different domains saying they've added me to their site and request that I do the same for them. I ignore every one of them.

One thing that I don't completely understand is the 301 redirecting thing I'm reading about. I have the following in my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://(www\.)?example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif¦jpg¦jpeg¦bmp¦png¦mpg¦mpeg¦avi¦wmv¦mov¦asf)$ - [F]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.example\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

That should just make sure that if someone doesn't type the www when coming to my site that it'll add it in. I had problems with duplicate members being logged into my forums is why I did that. It's been that way for over a year though and it was just 3 days ago that google deleted me.

The only thing I can think of that happened recently was I changed servers 2 weeks ago. I have a new IP address now. In the 4 years I've had my site though, I've probably went through as many servers and never had a problem with google.

[errorsamac]

TheOtherOne - A similar thing happened to me (changing servers/IPs on a domain) and I was banned. I think it was due to cloaking because the old server was spitting up a different page than the new server.

A good thread to read about Google bans is here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[JKMitchell]

Or this thread :-

[webmasterworld.com...]