Google Banned My Site: Now What?

You've been banned my Google. It is not the end of the world, but by search engine optimization standards, it is pretty darn close.

First step is to figure out why you got banned. If you did shady tactics such as submitting your site to a ton of link farms, your prognosis isn't good. (For more information, see the MyMommyBiz article Is Your Site Banned in Google? to determine if this is what got you banned.)

But there is another reason why your site got banned from Google, particularly if you have always been on the right side of the tracks with your site.

The primary reason is that when Google did its monthly crawl of the entire web, your website was unavailable. It could have been a glitch, your server might have been down, or your server might have been available, but just took a little too long to respond to Googlebot's request, so it assumed it wasn't there.

When this occurs, Googlebot (this is the name of Google's web crawler) may come back and check you during that same update, but maybe not. The higher your PR is, the more likely they will double check.

If you think your site might have been temporarily unavailable when Googlebot paid a visit, go back and check your server logs and see if you can find a visit from Googlebot a few days after the Google Dance. If Google came and visited most or all of your pages, it is more likely you can banned for shady optimization tactics. But if you cannot find Googlebot, and you have gaps in your logs for the time Googlebot likely was trying to access your site, it is likely it just couldn't find you at the time.

If this is the case, don't do anything drastic to your site. Wait for the next Google update. If it was temporaily unavailable, Googlebot will visit during the next crawl, and discover that you are still actually there, and index your site as usual and give you back your PageRank.

If you have determined that Google banned you for shady SEO (search engine optimization) practices, you have a lot more work to do. So much, in fact, that many people just ditch the former domain name and start with something new. It is much easier to build a site from a PR3 or PR4 (which most new sites are given) rather than trying to dig a banned site from the depths of PR0.

But Google will consider reincluding sites if you send an email to webmaster@google.com with "reinclusion request" as the subject - AFTER you have cleaned the entire site up. Do not email before your site is completely clean of spam techniques - if they see your site still doing the things it was banned for, you might hurt your chances to get your site included into the index again once it is clean.

Google also publishes webmaster guidelines here.