Have I been banned from Google?

9 replies
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Hi All,

I recently switched my site from a static site to a drupal site, and since doing this I've dropped COMPLETELY from all of the search terms I had previously been ranked on in google. I still appear in the results if I do a site search on my domain, but I'm just wondering if I did something wrong. I checked the webmaster tools and I don't see any crawl errors or anything like that. Any ideas?
#banned #google
  • Profile picture of the author PhilipSEO
    Originally Posted by vectorfrog View Post

    Hi All,

    I recently switched my site from a static site to a drupal site, and since doing this I've dropped COMPLETELY from all of the search terms I had previously been ranked on in google. I still appear in the results if I do a site search on my domain, but I'm just wondering if I did something wrong. I checked the webmaster tools and I don't see any crawl errors or anything like that. Any ideas?
    Since your site is showing up in search for its domain name, this means that you don't have a site-wide penalty. It's hard to perform diagnostics in the absence of a website, but these questions come to mind.

    Are your pages properly indexed? You can check by checking the cache of each page as well as by searching for long phrases (say, 6-7 words) from a page in quotation marks to see if Google is finding the page.

    If the pages are not indexed, check your robots.txt and metatages to see if they are not preventing indexing.

    If they are indexed, think about whether the URLs have changed. If so, this means you broke a bunch of backlinks pointing to your site. 301-redirect from old the URLs to the new ones. Also, if you have added more subfolders to your URLs, that's not so good for SEO.

    If none of the above, did you maybe lose your title tags which migrating to Drupal? Your alt tags? Things like that can also negatively affect your rankings.

    Did the navigation change? Are your internal pages now more clicks away from the home page? Also check your entire site for broken links (you can use Xenu for that).

    These are among the most common reasons, I hope it helps!
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  • Profile picture of the author vectorfrog
    Thanks Phillip, great tips, I'll go through your list of things to look at and start seeing if I dig anything up. My guess is that my robots.txt file is messed up since my homepage is not showing up in the google cache. The site is vinylletteringdecor.com, didn't mean to be mystic .
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  • Profile picture of the author Rock Solid
    Have you submitted a sitemap to Google? I know if you're using WP you can generate one easily. Also if your site is showing up in quotes with the URL but not with keywords you could of been sandboxed. How long ago since you dropped off? Recently or has it been a while?
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi vectorfrog.

      First let me ask did you change your URL structure? Is every new URL identical to the old URL? If not then you need to look no further. I have seen many folks make the mistake of switching to a new platform and abandon their old established URLs. That will instantly tank your rankings in the search engine, since many if not all of you backlinks will be obliterated you wont be back anytime soon either unless you immediately remedy the situation. 301 Redirect is your friend in this situation.

      Another issue I often see in a platform migration is the changing of page titles and meta descriptions. Particularly bad is if you are not using totally unique and relevant titles and meta description for each individual page. Google will drop the pages with duplicate meta data into the supplemental index.

      Any other type of problem will likely show up in Google's Webmaster Tools under diagnostics, so I would take a look there.

      I took a quick look at what Google has indexed for your site and discovered the cached pages appear to no longer be valid URLs. I getting the following errors:

      The page you requested does not exist. For your convenience, a search was performed using the query name boards.
      So, this definitely looks like the first item I mentioned above. You need to get busy putting your 301 redirects in place before your backlink sources start deleting their broken links.
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  • Profile picture of the author vectorfrog
    Thanks Guys, great stuff. I thought I had all of my 301 redirects in place, but it looks like I'm missing a few. Also, more pages are showing up today when I do a site: search in google, which is way faster than what I was expecting. I really appreciate the help.
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    • Profile picture of the author ramboo
      you might have done the copied content for your site that is why google is doing this kind of stuff.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jordan Kovats
    Maybe you are being re indexed? How long have you been gone for?
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    • I guess you are not banned, it also happened to my friend, he has a blog and he try to change the name and after that all his backlinks and popularity turn down and the one he change, the new one start again to bottom from google search engine, then when he try to use the old name the old one stop from being indexes and even the new. And when he try to update and do link-building again it seems that google just don't update and indexes easily the updated version of the blog. So just wait and just do your staff and continue updating your site sooner google would recognize it again.
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  • Profile picture of the author mattlaclear
    My bet is you're being reindexed because of the changes you made with your site. Give it a week or so then check back.
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