Is there any way to tell if Google has banned a site?

[carol]

I've been approached by a potential client to help market his newly-renovated site. A current client had recommended me to this gentleman months ago to do the website re-do, but they had already selected another firm. Now that the site is "finished," the potential client is complaining that no one can find it. The design firm is saying that they were paid to design the site, which they did - in Adobe GoLive 5, which I'm not familiar with - and they don't do SEO. The homepage contains only a Flash intro, and each interior page is top-heavy with a lot of scripting appearing before any content. When I looked at their old site, I found that the developer was using it as a hidden link farm for other sites (dozens of them) the developer had created. This new site has a new URL, although the old URL now points to the new one.

So, could Google have banned both URLs due to the hidden link farm? And if not, am I crazy to take this job?? While he assured me I could have access to the files on the webserver, I don't get the idea he's going to want me to change the content, or how anything looks.

Thanks for your input! carol

[cbp]

1. Google can not index flash sites, so they could not be listed for that reason.

2. If a site has links pointing to it from sites that are in the Google index, they should be in the index. If they are not in the index, most likely they have been banned.

However, almost all cases of allegedly "banned" websites that I have come across are not really banned (eg they ranked poorly; they had no links to the site; site was down during last googlebit visit etc)

If it was a hidden link problem, rumours are that the Google algorithm automatically detects it (its not very good at it), bans the site, periodically rechecks the site to see if cleaned up, makes the site spend time in the penalty box (eg a month), then reindexes them if still clean - I am not totally sure that this is accurate, but is my best guess. However a lot of hidden links gets missed by Google despite spam reports.

If it was a penalty and the site is clean, send a message to webmaster@google.com with the subject line 'reinclusion request' - plead the case ... and be patient.

Can you post the URL?

CBP

[carol]

Thanks for your response. I know Google can't index flash, but there are a lot of sites out there using it. Do those site developers submit an interior page to Google for inclusion??

The old site with the hidden links is pointing to the new site - not sure if any other sites are linking to the new site.

If they hire me and I can't get the new site included, I will take your suggestion about the "reinclusion request." (I don't feel I can post the URL at this point because they're not my client - yet...)

Thanks again,
carol

[janeth]

I will ask a question,
lets say that for the major key words like

Computers - the two top sites do not contain the word Computers in the page copy.

The only reason they are there is because of links coming to the site.

So with this in mind could you not take a total flash site work on nothing but links and get it ranked number one for a major key word.

[rlrouse]

So with this in mind could you not take a total flash site work on nothing but links and get it ranked number one for a major key word.

Yes, you could indeed, but it would take a ton of links for a super competitive keyword like computers (Apple has 89,000 backlinks in Google, Dell has 27,600. On Alltheweb, Apple has 3,298,204 backlinks, Dell 536,303).

[bbauer]

I'd like to ask a question about hidden links.

Obviously, if one makes the link the same color as the page background it is a hidden link.

But what about a link that has the same color as the rest of the text on the page so that unless folks happen to hit it with their mouse they don't realize that it is a link because there is nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the text on the page.

Is that considered hidden links too?

[rlrouse]

This could be seen by Google as an attempt to "fool" the search engines. The bots wouldn't pick it up but a competitor might. If it seems like a gray area, I tend to avoid it.

[janeth]

I agree with rlrouse
It is better to be up front on everything and not try anything sneaky

[bbauer]

I use color both ways in some of my blog links.
Often I use blue and underline on a blog where the links don't actually show up as links at all and one must "tumble" to the fact that they really are links due to the way the blog template produces them so by making them blue and underlined it leaves no doubt that they are links and sometimes I will make the text the same color as the font and then sometimes I leave them "natural" as produced by the blog.

So in a case like that I would tend to think they would
have an awfully hard time penalizing or even deciding which was which and why.

[spiderbait]

The simplest way that I know to see if Google has banned a site is as follows:

Search on Google for your domain name exactly as written, minus the .com, .net, .org or whatever.

eg. to see if webproworld.com has been banned, you would search for "webproworld"

In the results you will see either:

• links to webproworld.com if the site is actively indexed (this is also useful for seeing if Google has already indexed the domain)

or,

• if the site is banned you will see no results or only results for other sites that contain the word webproworld, (likely because they have links to webproworld.com}

Hope this helps. It works in most cases where the domain name is unique enough that it wouldn't appear as a commonly used term on too many other sites.