I started a thread on a similar forum which Im going to call spforum. I have just started educating myself on SEO and posted this problem I had. Thread Name: Site banned? I am brand spanking new to the SEO world but I am learning slowly. One of my sites has over 6000 search results when I search my domain in google as "mydomain"". This number is based on our press release and other link building campaigns such as submitting to social bookmarking sites. The site is about 1-2 months old. We just go rid of (2 days ago) the "no index no follow" the dumb-*** programmer forgot to remove from our site. The same day we uploaded the site map to google. When I type in the domain name in a google search with the extension ("mydomain") a link to the site shows up as the first result.....But no description below. Its been like this for a few weeks now. I'm hoping it because of the "no index no follow" and google still has not had the chance to list the site yet and that I should just be patient and wait. Anybody, please help 2 days later I posted this in the same thread: Well here is what I found out. I am a newbie to SEO, so be nice. First let me explain why I thought it was banned. My clients website is a remake of his old one, completely remodeled, new ip, new domain, new whois, (though im not sure if this matters). Why the remodel, well he had an affiliate that was doing some weird spam thingy, he didnt go into details, that got him banned. It made him alot money and he said at the time he didnt think it mattered what the affiliate was doing. Rightfully it got him banned, and his new signups DROPED the only thing keeping him a float is the current user base. So now that you got the history, back to my findings....... The reason why my domain name would come up in a search result without the description is because of Chrome, it remembered I searched it before. Its a setting by Chrome, I dont remember what its called. But as far as the "no index, no follow", the site admin reports that Google has crawled over 20k pages of the site, the day after we removed the "no index no follow". Im not sure if its because the removal of the "no index, no follow" or because he uploaded the site map that Google crawled it. This might be a sign its not banned. I wanted to try a test to see if the site was banned by Google or if its just not indexed yet. This might be some useful info for some one. For this explanation im going to call my clients site that I think is banned as: maybebannedsite. First, I created a quick Wordpress blog for “maybebannedsite†,(which I will call: maybebannedsiteblog) and gave it some quick content. Then I dugg it on Digg, (duhh), and after 8 hours, it came up first when I searched for it by its full domain with the dugg article beneath it.!!?? Which means Digg got me indexed. Not just that the maybebannedsiteblog comes up 4th in a serp when “maybebannedsite†is searched (without the “blog†word in the search) and second in the serp if you do a search for “maybebannedsite†with the tld extension. Why hasn’t maybebannedsite showed up yet when you search for it in Google? Is it banned or is it still recovering from “no follow no index� I will report again when I find out more, if any one cares. A couple of minutes later I posted this: As I posted the above I realized something. Maybe "maybebannedsite" does not have the keywords: "maybebannedsite" in the meta tags, so I checked, and it doesn't!! "maybebannedsiteblog" does, (bumping forehead) it has this: <link rel="canonical" href="http://maybebannedsiteblog" This must be something the Wordpress extension "All in one seo pack" did. Hmmmmm, could this be it, I bet it is. Newbies (note to self: going to have to research what a canonical link is.) I will post my findings here when they happen, if anyone cares.
<link rel="canonical"> should have nothing to do with the Google snippet. Where you often get a SERP listing with the <title> displayed, no snippet, but a URL displayed is in the situation where the page is flagged in robots.txt as disallowed, so Google cannot crawl the page (so it doesn't know what content is on the page)... but Google still sees lots of inbound links to the page even though it's disallowed. Based on the link text for those inbound links, if Google feels the URL might still be relevant to the user's search phrase then they will show it even though it is disallowed. I've never seen this with a page flagged with a <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">. A <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> will ALWAYS prevent Google from displaying the URL in the SERPs, and IF the page were previously indexed, it will cause Google to deindex the page. So I'm not quite sure why you're seeing this. Check your robots.txt and make sure the page is not disallowed.
We got rid of the <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> and changed it to allow and follow. But that was a while ago that we changed it to allow, but now we show on a serp when you search for the site name. Why? Well it showed up 8 hours after I inserted the site name with and without the tld in the keyword meta tag. But only a search for the site name with the tld shows up and not a search for just the site name. I think this proves that keyword are still relevant for Google. Why else did my site show up?