Heath's Blog

Sometimes poor ranking is not because of competition for your search term, but because you have a few more serious problems. Test your site for basic search engine problems.

1. Enter your domain name, minus the www., into the search box.  If your site shows up in the results when you hit the search button, you are not banned.  This is good.  If you don't see your domain in the results, this is bad. Very basic.  You may need to contact the search engine to see if they will tell you if you are actually banned and maybe they'll tell you why, too.

2. Next test: enter the domain name without the .com/.net/.biz or whichever your ending is.  This should also show your site, but it will probably show more sites that link to yours or reference yours.  These results can be good or bad also.  "Good" results are numerous numbers of results found, and "bad" is when there are few results in that search.  You can check this list to see when and where your site is referenced and how it is referenced.  More references can be a good thing, but check to se how and where your site is referenced.

3. Next search your "Title Tag".  If you aren't sure what this is, google the term "title tag".  When you run a search for the title tag, you should be higher in the list than you are in number two.  The reason is that this tag is what the spiders are being told is most relevant about your site.  Don't be misled by ONE page from your site showing up in the results, you want the page that has the title tag your search is for to show in the results - and preferably high on the list.  A page from your site may be in the results page, but you want the page you did your search for to be in the results, not just any page.

4. If you find youself referenced on many pages but dont find yourself high in the search terms you have designed your site for, you may need to send a note to all the sites that have you on a "links" page and request to be remomved.  The reason is that some search engines look at links pages that are not the home page of any site with a "black hat" eye.  Black Hat is a term used  to describe programming efforts specifically designed to fool spiders.  The spiders have adjusted to see pages that are only full of miscellaneous links, links that aren't really relevant to content, as black hat.  Often this type of link page is so deeply burried in a site that it only negatively affects your efforts.  So if you can remove yourself from those types of pages, the spiders will like your site more.  The spiders have learned to like truth as much as people do.

To review,
If you find you are banned, definately contact the search engine for instructions about how to correct the issue(s).  Most will also have a forum where you can ask questions.
If your "title tag" search isn't returning the page of your site that you want, ask your webmaster if they can/will correct the problem (which shouldn't be a problem).
Be patient after you correct the problem(s).  It can take months to get re-included, but that is because there are so many sites competing and so many new ones being added.

Research, study, clean or correct, and be patient.  And then do it again in a few months because the search engines change their spidering criteria.

Happy Listing and Selling!  And don't forget to see if you are linked from REindex.com, The Site Engine(sm) yet!