Google Deindexed Your BANS Store, Now What?

With a rash of fellow BANS users claiming they have been deindexed, I have had several emails asking what one should do to get back in the index. I thought I would address this on the blog today. I am actually trying to get a test site of mine deindexed myself so I can play around with some strategies myself.

First off, are you sure the site is deindexed?

1) Type "yourdomainname.com" and "www.yourdomainname.com" with the quotation marks into the search area of Google. If pages from your domain show up in the search results, then you are not deindexed.

2) Type site:yourdomainname.com and then site:yourdomainname.com into the search area for Google next. If results show up other than "…did not match any documents," then you are not deindexed.

If you run those few test and know at one time the site was indexed, but now it is not, it is not the end of the world.

Moving the whole site to a new domain is not the answer. You were deindexed for a reason and by moving the site to another domain is just putting a band aid on something that needs a tourniquet. Just because Google dropped you, does not mean the other SERPS have, so while working on getting back into Googles graces, you should still be adding backlinks and original content to help your rankings and traffic from other SERPS.

Getting Back In Google

The first thing is to go back and read what Google deems is an acceptable site per their guidelines. Yes you may have read it already, but read it again.

The second thing you want to do is thoroughly examine your robots.txt and .htaccess files. Is there anything in there that would be blocking Google and preventing you from getting spidered? I have seen instances where webmasters inadvertently were indeed blocking the Google bot.

If nothing jumps out with these quick checks then here are some things you can try that will not hurt in the long run and MAY help get you back in.

First block Google out of the site. Yes I said block them out. Just because Google has deindexed you, does not mean it stops crawling. Google hates being late to a fantastic party and like a nosey neighbor, always likes to know what is going on. To block Google only and prevent just the Googlebot from crawling your site for now, place the following code in your robots.txt file in your server root:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Secondly I highly advise shuffling the template or layout of your overall site. If that site is not converted to a BANS Wordpress integration, now might be a great time to do it, but it is not must mind you. You also want to look at every store category name, link text and meta tags for each page. Are these out of the box settings? More than likely it is and this HAS to be changed to unique names relative to your niche. Anything that is default after setup is a BIG no, no. Give the whole site a fresh coat of paint and a face lift. It will probably take a little while, but my plan involves blocking Google for at least 30 days, so take your time and do it right.

After the site has been thoroughly face lifted, you need to concentrate on original content. Your original content. If you can't write or buy it, you are in the wrong business to begin with. You need no less then 30 new pages of content or blog post. They need to be at the very least 200 words or better and closely related to your niche or overall related articles. Remember that this will also help in Yahoo and MSN Live, so it is not waisted work. After each page of new content is added, make sure to social bookmark each individual page with 5 different social bookmarking sites. Try to rotate through a different 5 with each page of content. DO NOT go spamming each page or blog post on EACH & EVERY social bookmarking site out there.

After 30 days of blocking the Googlebot and assuming everything above has been done, remove the block you put in your robots.txt file. After doing so, go fill out the re inclusion request with Google. Let them know you have rebuilt the whole site to better conform with the Webmaster guidelines and ask if they will kindly reconsider including you back into their index.

Watch your stat logs for the Google bot crawler and hopefully within another 30 days your site will be back in the Google index. It can take longer, but in all honestly it should be a 60 day process.

Related Posts by Categories