A Cre8asite Forums thread asks, how do you know if a search engine has penalized your site?
With most engines, the quickest method of checking that is to see if the engine has you in their index. How do you do that? Just do a site:www.domain.com command. Examples of those searches for this site:
- site:www.seroundtable.com at Google
- site:www.seroundtable.com at Yahoo! (redirects to Site Explorer)
- site:www.seroundtable.com at MSN (Live.com)
- inurl: www.seroundtable.com site:www.seroundtable.com at Ask.com
If no pages are found, you can assume something is wrong. If your site is very new, less than a month or so, then just wait and be patient (get more links). If it is Ask.com, they take longer than a month to get indexed. But if your site is old and it once was indexed in the search engines and you do not have any pages indexed now, then it may be a sign of a penalty.
If you exclude all site technical problems, the next thing you might want to do in Google's case is sign up with Google Sitemaps. They may show you enough detail to explain that you are banned and why... Or they may not.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.
