Has Your Site Been Penalized by Google?

Since Google is responsible for a large per centage of all search engine traffic, it is important that you rank well in Google. But if you seem to get very little traffic from Google, and you can only find your site when you type in your business name (and then, you sometimes have to search through pages to find your site) then you may have been banned from Google.

What sort of things will cause you to get banned or penalized?

• submitting your site to many Free For All (FFA) pages, especially when you privide a link back to them. These are also called link farms. This used to be an acceptable practice about eight years ago, but no more.
• Submitting your site to Google over and over and over again. Some webmasters believe this can cause a penalty, and even Google states you should only submit your site once.
• Linking to many, many other sites with a PR (PageRank) of 0, and having many sites with a PR of 0 link back to you. This is if the PR0 is a result of being banned, not simply because the site or page is new.
• Your site having little or none original content (this is especially true with sites that are replicated, meaning your site is identical or nearly identical to many others)

Wondering if your site is banned? Install the Google toolbar. (See the MyMommyBiz article The Google Toolbar for more information)

If your site shows a white bar, with no green, it means your PR is 0. While PR0 is also attributed to brand new sites, it can mean you have been banned.:( If the bar is all grey, it means your site hasn't been indexed.) The higher the number, the better Google sees your site as.

If your site is not brand new, and you have a PR0, type site:www.yourdomain.com into the Google search field (where you would normally type your search keywords. Obviously, change the yourdomain to your own URL. If you show results, you haven't been banned, but perhaps Google received an error when they crawled your site. But if you show no results, you should begin to look at your site and see what you may have done to become banned.

By example, CNN & eBay have a PR of 9/10, Yahoo is a 10/10 and MyMommyBiz is a 6/10 (which is extremely good for a site like mine). If your site has a PR of 5/10, you should be pleased!

This PR system is a gauge of how important Google thinks your site is. Most sites start off with a 3/10 or a 4/10. The PR will change after each Google PR update (every month or two).

If you believe your site may have been banned, read our article After You've Been Penalized By Google

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