Introduction

About this guide
+ Website Diagnostics Panel

Common issues

Duplicate content in Google
Supplemental Results
Omitted results in Google
Canonical URLs
Bulk update
Google PageRank
TrustRank
Website navigation
Buying links
Link Schemes
Bad neighborhood
Accessibility and Usability issues
Anchor text link
Scraper sites
Hijacking Google results
Historic domain penalty
DMOZ snippets
Removing a web site from the Google Index
Google Sitemaps
Reinclusion requests
The Google sandbox

Tools and services

Diagnostics Home
Googlerankings.com

To let you know what is WRONG with your web site.
A guide from Googlerankings.com, helping honest web sites stay indexed.
To get things started, see if either of the below statements apply to you.


I believe my web site has been banned from Google
+ Symptoms: Web site is not in the Google Index, not even for the site:example.com command

I believe my web site has been penalized by Google
+ Symptoms: Web site is in the Google index, but ranks significantly lower than before, sometimes in a noticeable pattern of losing its position throughout queries for important keywords and keyphrases. In some cases web site is not the first result for a search of its own domain name.

Important pages of my web site are shown as supplemental results
+ Symptoms: Pages of the web site that previously were shown as normal results are now Supplemental Results, thus rank significantly lower than other pages and web sites.

+ General Resolution: Analyze your web site.

Ask yourself the question whether it could be viewed as an attempt to trick the ranking system of Google. Search Engine Optimization itself is not against the guidelines, it is in fact needed for usability and accessibility. However if you have applied tactics on and off-site which you think might cause your pages to be banned or penalized, it is probably so. Keep in mind, if you or others have thought about a certain way to trick the algorithms by analyzing the behavior of the Google index, then the professional web site designers, developers and engineers at Google have also thought about it, and have designed a filter to identify such schemes. In case you feel you have done nothing wrong, you may have unknowingly set off a penalty by producing pages, links or content that are similar to such behavior.

In either case, the best thing to do is examine your pages, your incoming and outgoing links, correct the problem, then in case your site has been banned, do a reinclusion request in Google Webmaster Tools. Should you run into more complex problems, you can always turn to the online communities of the professional webmasters and search engine optimizers.

If either of the statements on the top of this page apply to you, you may want to read through the articles to learn more about possible causes. Also, open the + Website Diagnostics Panel , follow the links and instructions to diagnose your web site.

Web site diagnostics

Banned from Google
Penalized by Google
Supplemental Results
Unanswered problems