Recently I came across a few websites were banned by Google, these websites are quite clean in my eyes. One of the them is a company I worked for, online since 1992, the biggest one in its industry in Europe, they have no any SEO idea and only a PR 6 so far. Google seems to be very strict now.
It was PR 6 before banned. Actually a banned site with PR is quite common, toolbar update is not in real time.
Maybe I'm wrong, but when I check if a website is banned, I don't check the PR only, I will also check if the main page is cached, if not, I will treat it as a banned site, and I believe this case is very common.
Hurricane_sh, I haven't met any banned site yet. Would you be able tell us which site that you think that is banned. Umm I would like to work on it. Pleaseeee?
Take a look here. This site still has PR and pages indexed in Google but obviously Google suddenly stopped sending them traffic. I can't see any other explanation to this. I believe Google can ban sites in different ways as long as it serves their purpose. Sometimes PR is removed, simetimes PR is no longer passed to other site, simetimes pages is no longer indexed and sometimes none of this, just removed from normal SERPS. I can't proof this, it's only based on my experience. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/t...pare_sites=&y=r&url=http://www.fact-index.com
That site isn't banned though, you can find 50,000 plus pages indexed.. Because the rankings are suffering doesn't mean it is suffering a ban- a penalty of some kind, perhaps.
When a site is banned, aren't there zero pages found in the index? What is usually the cause when a site's main page doesn't have a cached copy in the index but Google has cache of other pages?
I recently worked on two sites that were banned by Google. Both were a few years old, both displayed zero PR, both showed zero backlinks, and both had zero pages in G's database. I think that's the standard way to identify a site that has been banned. My solution was to clean up the sites and have the site owners send 'mea culpa' e-mails to G. Both site owners did get responses. One was reinstated in a month, but the other took about five months. The first site was a victim of TP's black hat techniques, and I think G cut them some slack if they 'fessed up and admitted guilt by association with this company, along with a promise never to engage in these practices again. The offenses for the latter site were much more egregious, so it appears that G left them in a penalty situation for a period of time. Remeber that dirty tricks only work until you get caught.
It can also occur that you buy an expired domain name that has for some reason being excluded from the index. In this situation you can also contact GG letting them know of the change of the domain name ownership. I've had a couple of sites with this problem, and in both cases I have received a prompt reply from GG, both in the form of a written message and in the form of domain re-indexation. Just remember to be very polite and try to make their job as easy as possible, by sending them enough information, such as the copy of the receipt or invoice of the domain purchase. It's also proven to be helpful in this case, to send a link to the site archived information in the Archive.org database, along with the link to the current web site of course. .