Symptoms of Being Blocked by Google
Being aware of the symptoms that a website has been blocked by Google will be important for you to keep your online presence up and running smoothly, ensuring continuous traffic and engagement. Some of the commonest symptoms faced by any website once blocked by Google are as follows:
1. Disappear from Search Results
One of the scariest symptoms that may occur is when your website all of a sudden disappears from Google search results. This may greatly reduce the visibility and viewership of your site. Check if your site is still indexed through the command site:yourdomain.com within Google. If nothing shows up, it might be because Google has removed your site from its index.
Possible Causes:
Manual Penalty: This could be because of some violation of the Google guidelines that your website had.
Technical Issues: Your site could also be affected by some technical errors or algorithm updates on Google.
2. Huge Fall in Traffic
A sudden and drastic decline in website traffic, especially contributed by organic search, is yet another red flag. Use tools like Google Analytics or other web analytics tools to track your daily, weekly, or monthly trends in the flow of traffic. The moment you record a sudden drop in traffic, especially from the search engines, it becomes important to find out why this is happening immediately.
3. Warnings in Google Search Console
Google Search Console or GSC is a helpful tool providing insight into the performance and health of a website. When one sees warnings or errors, most relating to manual actions, it may only be that your site has violated certain guidelines placed by Google. Usually, guidelines run the gamut from content quality, link schemes, and user experience.
Types of Warnings:
Manual Action Notifications: These are messages that let one know that Google has taken some specific actions against the site since it fails to comply with the policies of Google. Among the technical problems that one may consider indicative of problems with indexing are crawl errors, such as 404 or server errors.
4. Website Cannot Be Accessed
Error messages when users or Googlebot try to access your site could also hint that something is in the way or not accessible. This could be due to server downtime, misconfigured DNS settings, or even Google flagging your site for security concerns, malware, or phishing. Possible Impact Increased Bounce Rate: Users facing accessibility issues are likely to leave the site, increasing the bounce rate.
Loss of Trust: Frequent issues of accessibility will damage your credibility and will make visitors avoid coming back again.
5. Page Marked as “Not Indexed”
If you open Google Search Console and notice that several pages of your site show a status of “not indexed,” it simply means that Google can’t include them in its index because it encountered some problems. The reason may vary from poor content quality, technical errors, or inability to follow some rules set by Google. Even first-class content will also be marked as undeserving of indexing, as it failed to correspond to some kind of standards.
Consequences of Not Being Indexed :
Lost Keyword Opportunities: Non-indexed pages won’t appear for a targeted keyword hence losing traffic.
Overall SEO Performance: A drop in the total number of indexed pages will have repercussions on overall SEO health and authority.
By being aware of these symptoms, one can take immediate and effective action to diagnose and rectify any underlying issues that may be causing your website to be blocked or penalized by Google.
The Impact of a Website Being Blocked by Google on Its SEO Performance
Your website’s being blocked or penalized by Google can have far-reaching implications for many of the facets of your SEO strategy. A few of the significant effects are detailed below:
1. Lower Domain Authority: Ongoing problems or penalties reduce the domain authority of your site and, as time goes by, you will hardly be able to rank for competitive keywords. Since domain authority represents one of the most important metrics, that decides your site’s trust and credibility from search engine perspectives, its reduction may bring long-lasting negative impacts on your overall SEO performance.
2. Lost Trust with Users: A blocked site can cause huge damage to the credibility of your brand among users. If any visitor notices the notice of your website being unsafe or hacked, then he will simply leave your website and never come back. The trust of users is difficult to achieve and, once lost, requires considerable effort and time to gain it back.
3. Long Recovery Time: The problems that led one to be blocked may necessitate long-reaching changes in structure, content, and SEO practices on your website. This may delay, depending on the severity of the problem, your proper and full participation in search engine rankings. Recovery efforts could take months, months when your competition garners unprecedented ground.
4. Higher recovery cost: When a website invokes penalties, the cost element goes through the roof since you may have to pay more for high-brow SEO techniques, audits, and perhaps contracting third-party firms to help correct these faults. It stretches resources, especially for small businesses.
5. Not Being Able to Get the Most out of Premium Contents: If your great content is sandboxed into Google or fails to get listed, you are losing out on quality traffic that could be better transformed into leads or sales. Great content that nobody can find is like the tree that fell in the woods with no one to hear it; which fuels your whole approach toward content marketing, of course. This visibility gap translates into fewer opportunities to get backlinks and social shares that would further help increase your reach.
Conclusion
Knowing the signs of a website being blocked by Google is very important to a business or content creator who aims to sustain a strong online presence. Signs such as disappearing from search results, big drops in traffic, warnings in Google Search Console, an inability to access it, and pages marked as “not indexed” should trigger an alarm that something is wrong, and immediate investigation with corrective action goes into motion. To find out what problems your website has, visit AlphaRank now.