Patricia's Planet

A call for help that I’ve seen a lot lately in the forums, mostly from newbie Internet Marketers but sometimes from the more experienced. I don’t pretend to know everything about de-indexing, sandboxing or Google’s mood swings but I know enough to be able to find out if a site has really been taken out of the index and how to sort it out. So that’s what I’m going to talk about today.

We will start at the beginning for those who are completely new to the game.

What is Indexing?

It’s like a huge Internet directory for websites. When you do a search for something the most relevant websites for your search terms should come up on your screen in list form – that is after the paid for ads of course which you will generally find are not so good, or thin affiliate sites. There can be thousands of relevant sites but the top ten positions apart from the ads are the most important to us Internet Marketers because they get the most visitors. Therefore we work hard to manipulate our sites into the top ten of the index for various keywords to increase the chances of our sites being found.

How do I know if my site has been indexed?

Just put site:yourdomainname into the Google search engine and underneath the search box you will hopefully see ‘About (a figure) Results’. The figure tells you how many pages and tags of your website or blog have been indexed by mighty Google. I tested it with this blog site:patriciajones.org and came up with ‘About 332 results’.

I then made up a domain and tested that getting ‘Your search – site:to.co.uk – did not match any documents’. That is what you get if your site hasn’t been indexed or has been de-indexed. BUT, sometimes your site might disappear out of the Google index and appear again the next day or the next week so don’t panic!

Sidenote: That could be a good way of looking for domains too. You can check out the competition at the same time as avoiding a domain being snatched up if you go away and think about it. I wonder if the domain to.co.uk is worth anything, you can get high prices for some short domains.

Back to De-indexing

Your website still isn’t in the index after several days so your next step is to figure out why Google doesn’t want it in their index any more and sort it out. Before we do that there are some myths that you need to know about:

• Once a site has been indexed it can’t be de-indexed – wrong
• Social bookmark it to a lot of sites and it will get indexed again – wrong
• Use some software to get masses of backlinks and it will get indexed – wrong
• Once a site has been de-indexed you can’t get it indexed again – wrong

Those were pieces of bad advice that I’ve seen bandied about and clearly from those who know far less about it than I.

What Do I Do To Get Re-indexed Then?

You need to pay a visit to Googles Webmaster Tools. I logged into the sitemap section and on the left hand site of the page found a link saying ‘Requesting reconsideration of your site’. Clicking on that took me to a page where you have several options. One is to watch a video showing you why your site may not be appearing in the search results and how to get it reconsidered. Or you can check to see if you are violating the webmaster guidelines.

It may be that you have just bought a domain that the previous owner has violated the guidelines, or that your site is deemed to offer poor quality for visitors. For example: full of keyword spam, a thin affiliate site, scraped and spinned until you can’t understand it content. Or your site may be linked to a bad neighborhood: porn, gambing and online pharmacies are the worst.

Those are just some of the reasons, but you need to figure it out for yourself because asking Google is pointless, you won’t get told why your site has been de-indexed. Once you have figured it out fix it. Improve the content, add good infomation and unique to your site content. Get rid of those bad links. Now they may have come through using a free theme or buying a cheap theme from a second party and you may have to change themes to get rid of the links.

Once you think that you have resolved the problem Google say that you should take these 3 steps:

1. Sign in to Webmaster Tools with your Google Account.
2. Make sure you have added and verified the site you want reconsidered.
3. Request reconsideration of your site.

You should get an automated reply saying that they will check your site within a timeline.

Will it work?

Yes if you do it right. I’ve got a games site that was deindexed a few years back. I’d used cheap hosting that I bought on Ebay and the hosting and sites disappeared after several months leaving me high and dry. I got more reliable hosting at Hostgator and put my other sites back online but forgot about the games site. A year later I set it up again as a semi auto blog and after some time realised that it wasn’t indexed in Google, though it was still getting some good traffic from the other search engines.

I applied for reconsideration and nothing happened. So I added some more content and got some guest bloggers and reapplied. I didn’t hear anything back but a few weeks later it had been re-indexed and was getting Google traffic again. It wasn’t difficult really and when you think about it if you improve your sites you also improve your earnings potential and that can’t be a bad thing can it?

PS

The Google dance or sandboxing are entirely different things. Sometimes you get your site high in the rankings and it suddenly drops back significantly. That’s just Google taking time to decide how relevant your site is and where it should be in the rankings. When that’s happened to me my sites have come back a few weeks later stronger than ever.

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