Why a Site/blog is Deindexed, delisted or banned by Google and How to Fix it.
Roots and Causes of a site or blog being banned by Google search engine and tutorial how to solve the issue
1. Wrong setting of Robots and/or Meta Tags
2. Site/blog contains Virus (malware or spyware)
3. Cloaking
4. Duplicate Content or Websites
5. Hidden Text and or Links
6. Keyword Spam and Keyword Stuffing
7. Selling Links
8. Linking to Bad Neighborhoods
9. Sending automated queries to Google.
1. Wrong setting of Robots and/or Meta Tags
A. If you create Robots.txt file in your website, make sure the setting is allowing the search engines particularly Google to visit your site / blog. See simple robots.txt and SEO robots.txt for WordPress.
B. If you put Meta Tag in the header, make sure it’s allowing Google and other search engines bots to index your blog/site contents. Check your site through View -> Page Source. It should be like: <meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />
2. Site/blog contains Virus (malware or spyware)
There are two possible causes why your blog / website contains a virus.
First, your computer from which you update your blog contains virus. To make sure that your PC is virus-free, make a regular scan with anti-virus.
Second, your blog contain a link to a external website which contain malware or spyware. To make sure that any external link is virus free, scan any new external link you would like to put on your blog using website scanning which is available online. Here are a couple of links you can use to scan an external link online without any need to install:
Cloaking, according to Wikipedia, is technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user’s browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page.
Cloaking is strictly prohibit by search engine particularly Google. In SEO world, cloaking is considered a major sin.
4. Duplicate Content in Blogs or Websites
There are two types of duplicate content.
- It could mean literally a content which is identical between two sites or more. One copy/paste another. Which site will get penalties is not certain. The original source could be the one that suffers. Either way it’s not a good start to begin with. This is uncontrollable situation you cannot solve. Just hope for the best. And ask the plagiarist to remove your content from his site.
- Duplicate contents within one site. Blogging platform creates such problems as duplicate content in Google eyes. And it needs to be fixed to avoid penalties from Google. How to fix duplicate contents click here.
Google says, Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:
- Using white text on a white background
- Including text behind an image
- Using CSS to hide text
- Setting the font size to 0
Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:
- The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
- CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
- The link is hidden in a small character – for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.
6. Keyword Spam and Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking.
7. Selling Links
Selling link in your website might not cause your site to be banned. But it’ll surely decrease your site ranking. Paid link which is prohibited by Google is a do-follow link that passes ranking. It’s ok if the advertiser agree to buy a no-follow link in your site.
8 Linking to Bad Neighborhoods
Be careful if you want to give a backlink to a particularly site or blog. If the site is blacklisted by Google because of violationg Google TOS, your site could be affected too. The safest way is by giving a no-follow link. Or if you’d like to give a do-follow link to it scan the site first, refer to rule #2.
9. Sending automated queries to Google
This practice is the work of Auto Generated Content (AGC) or Automated Content plugins. If you want your site/blog being banned, don’t install the plugins. But if you just want to experiment and experience having blog with a lot of traffic without doing anything, you may try it. The choice is yours.
