Truth 47. It’s very difficult to get unbanned

If you, or your search engine optimizer, has been very, very bad, unethical, and violated Webmaster Guidelines, your site can be banned from organic search results. Nobody’s going to send you a warning or a telegram when the deed is done. Instead, your site will suddenly just disappear—poof!—from organic results. In short order, web traffic will follow suit.

Getting banned from search engine results turns a website into the proverbial tree falling in the proverbial woods. It’s there. But no one can “hear” it. Or, find it, either.

Although outright, full-scale bans are hardly an everyday occurrence, they can and do happen, even to major brands. In 2006, BMW’s German sites were banned from ...

Get The Truth About Search Engine Optimization now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.