Understanding When a Website Is Penalized or Banned by Google

Reading various posts and blogs about SEO and Web marketing, I couldn’t help but notice that many users and webmasters are not clear about the difference between a banned site and a penalized site. Also, for some time now, a drop in the SERPs (search results) is immediately associated with a penalty: this is not true and I hope this post clearly outlines the two meanings and how to understand whether your site is penalized or banned. Difference between site penalty and ban PENALTY: the website is present with at least one page within Google’s indexes but is “demoted” in position within the SERPs where it used to appear in the top results (first 2 pages). In these terms, there are various forms of penalties (-30 penalty, -950 penalty, etc.) and usually, most penalties are detected 70% thanks to anti-spam algorithms and are just as frequently resolved (removed) through algorithmic means. Usually, penalties occur when spammy (mild and massive) techniques are used to manipulate SERP results. BAN: the site is completely excluded from Google’s indexes (it is not indexed in any way, even for searches containing the domain name). This exclusion from the indexes happens, more or less, 40% algorithmically, but more frequently it is a manual operation due to reports received by quality raters who study sites present among the search results. A site can be banned for various reasons, here are only the most frequent: # Use of advanced SPAM techniques (cloaking, doorways pages, etc.) # Backlinks to a Banned site (if the site links to an already banned site, the ban likely extends to the linking site as well) # Creation of a SPAM network Now that we have better defined the meanings of penalty and ban, let’s see how to discover if a site is a victim of these two anti-spam actions carried out by Google. How to understand if a site is penalized Personally, to evaluate a site’s penalty, I proceed as follows: 1) perform a query (search) on Google for the domain (excluding “http://www.”) for example: “nomesito.it”. If the site is not in the top 5 positions, there is a good chance the site is penalized; 2) to be more certain, repeat the query also for the domain with “www.” for example: “www.nomesito.it” and draw the same conclusions as in the previous point; 3) finally, as the final test, just search the domain name (always without “http://www.”) plus a main keyword for which the site is optimized, for example: “nomesito.it main keyword”. If the site still appears below the top 5 positions, the penalty is “almost” certain (almost because under special conditions, such as sinusoidal fluctuations of Google’s SERPs, the site might not actually be penalized but just in a particular phase of analysis by Google). How to understand if a site is Banned Personally, I use these simple techniques to evaluate if a site has been banned by Google: 1) the simplest and most immediate solution: perform a search with the command “site:” + domain name, for example “site:www.nomesito.it”. If no results are found, then the probability that the site is banned is very high. However, be careful, this could also just mean that the site has not yet been indexed. 2) by registering the site with Google’s Webmaster Tools, on the homepage related to the website (after verification) it is possible to see some indications by Google’s crawler clearly indicating the reason why the site is not present in the indexes (remember that through Webmaster Tools it is also possible to request re-inclusion of a banned site). I really hope to have clarified things for all webmasters and enthusiasts who periodically check the SERPs and the results of their websites based on the ranking achieved on Google.