Banned or just stuck?

How to tell if a site is banned or just stuck in Google

[Drew]

There is a site that I am looking at that I believe he has some judgments against him from Google.

There are “old” pages indexed by Google. But it doesn’t seem that Google has indexed their site since mid 2005 and the links are all old pages which are not there anymore.

This is a strange case as they have “old” pages in Google, they have a Google sitemap, but they are not getting indexed by Google.

I resubmitted their URL to Google for crawling. Maybe that will jar something in Google’s bot.

Any way to tell if they have a judgement against them?

All the stuff that I can thing of say no.
They have a page rank.
They have indexed pages (although stale)
They were approved for an xml sitemap.

Ugh!

[edited by: caveman at 4:05 pm (utc) on April 27, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed specifics, per TOS [/edit]

[MrPatate]

Same thing here... I am lost.

When searching for site:blah.com, I get pages that were deleted one year ago. The website has only 13 pages indexed in Google, with 4 of these being the unexisting ones. In all, website has about 500 pages, online since septebmer 2005. Sitemap.xml was submitted to Google, and I can see the crawler in the stats, with sometimes as many as 100 hits per day from the googlebot.

I am still not thinking about positionning, I just want to get into the index... I don't see why it is'nt : this is not Flash site, no sessions, no frames, etc... just plain html.

[Lorel]

Look for 302 redirects in the inurl search in Google as these can cause a site to disappear from Google's index.

[tedster]

There are "old" pages indexed by Google. But it doesn't seem that Google has indexed their site since mid 2005 and the links are all old pages which are not there anymore.

Then the site is not banned -- banned sites get removed from the index.

I would check the logs to see if Google is currently crawling the site, and also to see if any traffic is coming from Google -- sometimes pages get shown in the SERPs that don't show in a site: query (especially in this crazy moment.)

Many sites are reporting old cache dates right now, even sites that showed a more current cache in recent months. Apparently there is a problem behind the scenes at Google, but if current spidering is going on, then hope for a fix is reasonable.

Check the site for all the technical issues mentioned in these threads - can't hurt:

Checklist for Sudden Drops in Rank [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped from Google - a checklist to find out why [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com]
The url-only problem [webmasterworld.com]

[Drew]

Thanks all! Sounds like the log files will be my best next step. I asked Google to remove the cached pages too. Seems there is some very strange caching going on out there.
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