I don’t think any one can be an expert SEO without ever been experienced any Google Penalty. I have read many articles, blog posts and forums about Google banned a website. The most common line I found there is that I woke up in the morning and found that Google slapped me badly (My website is no where in Google). Oh my God I have lost all my rankings. I always used to think why every people found they have banned in the morning. Why not some people find it while working checked the ranking and on the very next moment he is banned. Whatever happened with the others, I have never thought I will also come across with the same condition. But this is the real truth of Google world, you have to face it.29 October 2009 when I checked ranking of my websites, I could not even believed in my eyes. I tried all the variations of keywords but my website was nowhere. I tried domain name too but still showing nothing. I checked few more websites I was working on and worst I found. All my major websites were out of Google Index. Finally used Google Site operator to find my websites that I was restricting myself to does that as it may confirm my websites gone completely. And that too didn’t return anything.
Was it Google Penalty only or complete Ban?
First of all what is Google Penalty I believe, if your traffic down unnaturally or your keywords lost ranking in a drastic manner not because of any issues like mistakenly disallow your important pages in robots.txt or your ISP having any technical issues which makes your website unavailable to Search Engine for long time. So if I try to find out is it my website penalized on this definition then YES it seems that my website is penalized. But I had to confirm is it only penalty or a complete ban in Google. I have done some checking and testing that put me nowhere.
What Checks I Have Done:
- Checked PR: No change found.
- Checked website with Site operator: Google showed no results.
- Checked website with link operator: Google showed results.
- Checked GA account: Google is giving traffic (reduced traffic by 90%).
- Checked Webmaster Tool: Says all the pages are included in Google Index. (Google webmaster might not have been updated).
But when I think deeper on rest of the other checks I found they may be deceptive. It’s true that PR check is not a reliable way to determine whether a website is banned or not? Google Analytics showing visit through Google, this may be because of results might have not been updated in all the Google datacenters. And the Google Webmaster Tool might have not been completely updated and showing old ranking and statistics.
The only link operator check I could not find any reason to be deceptive. So my website is completely banned or penalized is hard to say at this moment. I will be able conclude is it really ban or penalty as soon as I find some updated statistics in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. But till then I will have to wait and watch at Google’s mercy.
