How do you KNOW when Google or other search engines have banned you? Also wondering about which other engines do 'banning' -- and how to check them as well.

Marty R. Milette

Hi Marty,

This is a very popular question in search engine discussions especially with new optimization enthusiasts. Very often, people believe that if their websites are not in Google within 1 or 2 months after being designed, optimized and hosted, there must be a ban on their website. However, this need not necessarily be the case, as is explained later.

The Page Rank tool that Google provides has become highly popular these days. Not only is it used by Google's visitors and online surfers who have downloaded the Toolbar, it is also used by optimization experts as an indicator, measurement tool and guide to many of the unsolved questions and mysteries that each website may bring up. Therefore if you need to know whether a website is banned or not, the Google Toolbar is usually the first method by which one will confirm if the case is so or not.

Firstly, if you do not already have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer, you may go here and follow the steps outlined to install it onto your computer: http://toolbar.google.com/ It will save you time in searching the web, searching within a website, checking Google's Pagerank of a particular webpage and getting more information about the page being viewed.

Let me begin by breaking a myth associated with Page Rank. Contrary to popular opinion, a PR of 0 does not mean that the site is banned. It means that there just aren't enough links to it. So never worry if your new site has a PR of 0. Let's proceed and find out how we can ascertain that a site has been banned by Google. When the user takes the mouse pointer over the toolbar and the Page Rank is shown as "Current page is not ranked by Google", then it is a possibility that the website is banned. However, one can never be sure with this method because a new website that has not yet been indexed by Google will always give the same message but as you would agree, that does not mean the website is banned. But if your website had a positive Page Rank earlier and you get this message now, then chances are that your website may have been banned. Again, however, we cannot be certain, for what could have happened is that your server and website could be down precisely when Google was crawling your website. If this happens then the website is temporarily dropped from the Google index.

The best way to verify whether the site is banned is to go to Google's website at http://www.google.com and give the search query "+www.yoursite.+com" (with the quotes). See whether any pages from your site are displayed in the search results. If there are some pages from your site, then you can rest assured it has not been banned. If there are no pages from your site in the results, and you are sure that your pages were listed earlier, then your site is probably banned.

Apart from Google, every other engine can ban sites if the sites have used any techniques that the engine does not like. The simplest way to find out if you are banned is by going to the search engine and typing in the URL of the site in the search box. See whether your website comes up in the results. If it does not, but used to do earlier, then it may have been banned.