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Is your website blacklisted by a search engine?

There will be occasions when your website might be thrown out of a search engine for no reason at all. Actually you may not even have done anything wrong at all and you may still be thrown out. Why would that be? If you follow standard web design practices and a substantial number of websites start to employ the same tricks, it is not uncommon for search engines to penalize all websites so that they can control search engine manipulation. In other words, you are simply a victim of search engine algorithm change. (Related article: How to do marketing for your website?)

What can you do if a search engine blacklists your website?

  1. You can write to them. However, except for Google, do not even expect that your email will be read by a human being. You might simply receive an automated response. With the huge number of websites on the Internet and the number of emails that the search engine staff might receive, it is unreasonable for you to expect that someone will actually read that email. Most companies do not bother to read or respond to emails unless they are from paying customers.
  2. Another point to remember is that in most cases blacklisting of a website is not done by a human. It is an automated process. Thus, changing the database to include a website that has been thrown out by a computer is not easy.
  3. Most search engines do provide some guidelines about what they consider as unacceptable practices for web design. Read these carefully and if you realize that some of them apply to you, try to redesign your website. But as I said before, a practice that is encouraged by one search engine may mean blacklisting by another.
  4. Finally, it is important to understand that some of the search engines use these methods to force you to pay them for inclusion in their results. This is simply a desperate attempt by these search engines to make money either through a listing or through advertising.

A snapshot of the MSN search page.

Suggested strategy if you get blacklisted

While it is important to use good web design practices, you do not have to change your practice if you rank well in most search engines but one of them bans you. However, if your analysis shows that you can make minor changes to satisfy the requirements of that search engine, it is fine to do so but most search engines do not have automatic reinclusion feature. In other words, the system will throw you out but will not automatically include you back because once you are thrown out, the spiders stop crawling your website. So my suggestion is that you should simply move on and focus on other search engines.

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