If you find yourself in a position where your traffic has oddly troughed to next to nothing, it’s a good idea to double check your status in the search results. If you were featuring in a certain position and now seem to be absent from the SERPs entirely, you could have been excluded from the search engine’s index. Chances are, if you’ve been doing something naughty, you’ve been expecting this, but if you can’t fathom your sudden disappearance out, you need to check if you’ve been banned immediately, as the repercussions can be significant. A famous example of this is the case of BMW back in 2006.
In the news
BMW got banned from the Google search results due to their use of doorway pages. At the time, their Javascript site was unsearchable by Google’s spiders, so they created ‘doorway’ pages that focused on ‘used car’ keywords and redirected the user to the BMW main site. This inflated their position in the SERPs – until Google found out. While BMW denied misleading web users, on the grounds that the content users were redirected to wasn’t any different in principle to the doorway page, they were still penalised with a zero PageRank as Google maintained that all doorway pages were illegal no matter what. (Original article: BBC News, Feb 6 2006, BMW given Google Death Penalty). It is not fully documented as to the ultimate cost this had to BMW but is probably sufficient to say that the volume of lost traffic and converting customers must have dented their bottom line somewhat.
Don't let sloppy SEO catch you out
Why get banned?
It’s not always instantly apparent that you have been banned. One way to check whether your site has been excluded or not is to type ’site:www.yoursite.com’ into the Google toolbar. If you don’t turn up, it would suggest you’re no longer in their index. There could be some perfectly innocent and easily solvable explanation for this. It could be that your Robots.txt file that controls what the Google bots can and cannot crawl is set up incorrectly. Instead of blocking them from a certain area, you may have blocked them altogether, thus preventing them from indexing you. You might even have your meta tags wrongly coded and be unwittingly bouncing the spiders away as soon as they get to you. These mistakes are easily rectified and will result in you being re-indexed once fixed.
Black hat bans
It is possible that you may have fallen into some shady areas of SEO practice by mistake. For example, if you set up domains for .com, .co.uk, .org and so on to protect your brand or business, but duplicated the content on each domain, Google will punish this. Choosing a primary domain and putting a 301 redirect from the other sites is the best way to get out of hot water in this case.
You might also want to double check what sites you’ve linked to. If you’ve been doing things properly you’re likely to know this anyway, but giving the innocent the benefit of the doubt, it is possible to link to a site that is not behaving ethically without realising. You will get tarred with the same brush once their bad habits are found out and pleading ignorance may not get you out of it.
Getting re-indexed
If you do find out you’ve been banned, using Google as an example, you can visit their Webmaster Tools section to check for any crawling errors. It is wise to check your site thoroughly against the Webmaster Guidelines to ensure you have adhered properly to Google’s rules before submitting a re-inclusion request via the Webmaster Tools area. If the problem is simple or the fault of the spiders, you will be re-indexed very quickly. However, if you have unwittingly slipped into any optimization activity that is disapproved by Google, it could take months to get you back into the SERPs. It should be said, that it is highly unlikely for someone who is not deliberately trying to fool the search bots to get banned. Real spammers know the risks and expect to be banned within a fairly short space of time, but for everyone else, it is a good idea to refresh your knowledge of the search engine guidelines on a regular basis.