Every now and again I will be contacted by a website owner who believes Google is punishing them. They may have experienced a significant drop in traffic, not appear in Google at all, or they’re not being found for keywords they used to be.

Search engines have always been very secretive about the punishments they deliver, but we do know that they’re automated, and they can mostly be reversed.

Punishments are a tense and uncomfortable time for business owners as there is very limited information about what specifically can be done to fix the problem. In my experience reversing punishments is not a quick and easy process, so can cause a drop in revenue through the website.

Penalty

This is the most common punishment we see delivered by the search engine gods, and it’s also the most difficult to identify.

Usually you will notice you have a penalty because your traffic from search engines will suffer a significant decrease. This is most commonly associated with your website not appearing for search terms that you formerly enjoyed traffic from.

If you are still listed in Google, but can’t be found in the first 50 listings, then chances are a penalty has been applied to your site.

Ban

The worst type of punishment is a ban. We don’t see these very often, but they certainly exist, and are to be feared.

A ban occurs when the website can no longer be found in the search engine. You can check if you have been banned by doing a search for your business name, or running a site command in Google.

The site command will tell you how many pages in your website Google has in its index, so if you see any pages at all, you haven’t been banned. Here’s how you check:

site:www.yourdomain.com.au

So in my case, I’d be typing in site:www.nickyjurd.com.

If you have been banned, the best thing you can do is wait a couple of days. Sometimes the engines have little jitters when doing an update and you might inadvertently fall out of the index temporarily. If after a few days there is no improvement, then you’re permitted to begin worrying.

Some new website owners mistakenly believe they’ve been banned, when they just haven’t yet been added to the index.