Google Ban

How do you find out if your site was banned from Google?

[pawel]

How do you find out if your site was banned from Google? It's not that mine was already;), just wondering. Is grayed PageRank bar in Google toolbar a sign?
BTW, I am sort of newbie to this, we're just planning to do some SEO on our site - are there things to be wary of when considering different optimization tricks?
thanks

[Mohamed_E]

> are there things to be wary of when considering different optimization tricks?

Let me suggest not using any "tricks" unless you really and truly understand what you are doing.

There are basically two ways of getting banned:

1. You are taking a calculated risk, know what the costs and benefits are, and have a plan B in case you do get banned. Not what I would do, but still definitely a rational strategy.

2. You have heard of a neat trick and go straight ahead and implement it without any thought about possible consequences. Strategies don't get much more irrational than this very common one.

[MotherE]

pawel,

How do you find out if your site was banned from Google?

If you've been in Google with a Page Rank of 4 and then it goes to zero (white bar) all at once and you know you have links to your site that are being ignored by Google. You can still have thousands of pages in their index, though. Maybe this would be called "penalized". This has happened to my site.

For some, a gray bar is banned. But, again, that would only be if your site has already been in Google. I haven't experienced this.

See [google.com...] if you haven't already.

[pawel]

;)
Mohamed,
I must have made myself not clear enough - didn't mean tricks as keyword stuffing (understood in the way of placing tons of transparent text on sites just to get high keyword density, or ALT descriptions in IMG tags stuffed with keywords). Talking *only* about TRUE optimization, not this kind of spamming techniques.
Mother_E,
can you say something more on what happened to you? Was it really sth you should have been doing, or you got banned and consider it, say, not fair? Did you mail the Google people on it?

[MotherE]

pawel,

I did something I should not have. It happened in August 2001. I emailed Google about it and I think they let the index page get a PR1 but left the rest of pages at PR0. I'd rather not discuss my site any more.

Follow Google's guidelines and you'll do alright.

[AbraxasEnt]

one of my sites was banned from google due to hidden text, i removed it, emailed them and they listed it back today but will i get the same amount of hits from them before? or do i have to wait until google updates again? will my site be penalized in the ranks because of this? thanks

[BigDave]

AbraxasEnt,

You will likely get the amount of traffic your site deserves, not what it got while you were spamming with the hidden text.

If your page was about motorcycles, and you had hidden text about teddy bears, you should get all the motorcycle traffic you got before, but none of the teddybear traffic.

If you were using it to increase your keyword density, your rank will probably change, but not necessarily towards the bad.

[AbraxasEnt]

yeah i just checked out the PR ranking and its 4, so i guess thats good. thanks!

[DaveN]

grey PR in toolbar means not in the database or toolbar glitch(seeing more glitch's than bans)

white pr in toolbar means google has hit you with a penalty or you have no backlinks at all

Green PR but brand new page Toolbar just guess what the pr is.

Dave

[jeyval]

Abraxas...Can I ask how long ago your site got banned in the first place?

Just interested in the time frame

Thanks very much and congratulations for being back

[AbraxasEnt]

it was banned around may 1st or the 2nd. i took my sweet time doing anything because i was thinking of just starting a new site, i didn't think getting listed again would be easy. but i removed all the hidden text, made sure my site followed the quality guidelines, emailed them today and got a response today saying im back :)

[jeyval]

Thanks

Did you send the email "today I believe you are saying and today I believe you got the response" to "[e-mail]"?

Thanks again and let us know if your site go back to its same position

[AbraxasEnt]

well i first emailed them when the site was banned, asking why. they told me to fix my site and to email them back, so finally i did today. the address i emailed was help@google

[jeyval]

Thanks

I did email them to that email + to support@google almost a week ago but no answer up to date

Anyway good luck and dont let it happen again :)