I just got into an SEO discussion about someone’s site who was banned by Google. Looking back over it, my last reply might be helpful to others, so I decided to post it here.

Q. Help! All my traffic from Google has stopped and I lost my Pagerank. Am I banned or penalized?

A.
If you’ve lost 100% of your traffic (not a single hit from Google), and you’ve lost your Pagerank, you’re not penalized (and sandboxed)… you’re banned. If you’re still unsure, later in this article I give a way to test without a doubt if you’re banned or penalized.

Google has various levels of punishment, based on your offense. If they think it’s innocent or accidental, they penalize you. If they think you did it on purpose trying to cheat the system, they ban you.

Now the bad news. After a website is banned from Google it’s removed from the index completely and will never be readded. Penalized sites are still in the index, but much lower in the result pages. There is no appeal process for a banned or penalized site (it’s not a judicial system- if Google giveith, Google can also taketh away).

Now, no one is completely sure how Google functions. They only publish some of their inner-workings, and the rest are still secret. A domain that is issued a ban by Google will never be reincluded in the index again as long as it’s registered, however there is speculation that if a domain is not renewed, and a period of X months or years pass, a new person registering the domain will not suffer the same penalty (ie, the ban on that domain is lifted), however that doesn’t help you much. Also there’s speculation that Google does not just ban the domain, but also the entire IP address, however I have my personal doubts about this because of shared hosting, however I could see them watching it more closely.

You can check to see if your domain is banned from the Google index by searching for your entire domain as a query, and if it had PR at any point in time (even 0), it will always return. If there are no results, but you’ve been in Google before, they didn’t forget about you… you’ve been banned. Check your site here: Google Link

On that note, I’d recommend what I said above. Cut your losses, gather your content (except what caused you to be banned, usually material that tries to manipulate or fool Googlebot’s keyword detection), register a brand new domain name, and begin building again. Another point though, is before I recommended setting up a 301 redirection on your old domain, and while it is still needed for other search engines, it will do nothing with Google. When Googlebot is crawling another site and sees a link to your old domain, it won’t even bother following it (to get the redirect), because it’ll realize that domain is banned and stop right there… so in Google, you WILL lose all your backlinks when you setup your new site. There is no way to avoid this, except tracing as many of the high PR links as you can find, and emailing the webmasters asking them to change where their link is pointing to. However don’t get me wrong, if you do not setup the 301 redirect, the other search engines will be confused as well and you’ll also lose their traffic (so do it).

Sorry about this, but hopefully you understand the situation now and can begin rebuilding to get back on your feet as quickly as possible. Good luck with everything!

Other Helpful Replies in the Discussion

Earlier in the conversation, they thought their website was simply penalized. Here was my reply on sandboxing and penalties:

Sorry to hear about that. Average penalized site takes about 6 months to come out of the sandbox. Granted some are less, but some are also more.

I’d actually recommend grabbing a different domain, copying over your content, and begin rebranding. Setup a 301 permanent redirect on your domain so you still retain credit for all your links and it bleeds PR, but you have a clean name to work with.

Good luck!

And they asked “that would be if it was a new domain right ? . . less than 2 years registered”, so I clarify the “new domain sandbox” confusion:

No, the sandbox has nothing to do with a new domain.

When a website gets penalized for some reason, it goes to the sandbox where it comes up lower on the SERPs.

When a domain is new, it simply does not have pagerank. It can go to PR5 the next week with enough inbound links, but a penalized site in the sandbox cannot get PR again (and high placement in SERPs) until the penality is lifted.

Hope that helped!

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