Five Reasons Why Web Sites Can Be 'De-listed' By Search Engines

Have you ever submitted a site for submission to the search engines over and over again without ever getting indexed? Or perhaps your site was indexed, but it is found so far down the list your bottom feeding in the listings? Here are Five reasons why your site might be de-listed.

With over 2 billion pages on the internet, getting a top listing in the search engines is a very competitive game. But what if you think you’ve done everything right and you’ve followed my advice in…..and still the search engines hasn’t listed your site?

Check the following list to be sure you haven’t done something that might have caused your site to be 'de-listed'.

Top five reasons a site can be 'de-listed' or 'rejected' by the search engines

1. Shared IP Addresses: Recently major search engines began to use a Reverse DNS lookup to verify sites before they are indexed. Sites with domain names that don't match their IP addresses are either rejected or penalized.

To check if your site passes the Reverse DNS lookup test, go to http://www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html. Enter your websites URL to determine what your servers IP address. Then use the other feature on the same form to reverse check the IP address. You should see your home page - if not, then you are on a 'shared IP' host.

If you are on a 'shared IP host', you will fail the Reverse DNS lookup used by the search engines and your site might be rejected or de-listed. The best solution is to simply move your site to a hosting service which does not share IP addresses.

2. Blacklisted Host: However not all shared Hosts are bad. The search engines know this so they also now check to see if IP address associated with a domain name is on any of the major "Spam Black Lists' before the site is ranked. If the IP is on the BlackList, the search engine may reject or 'de-list' the site.

To check to see if your IP address is on the Spam Blacklist, go to http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx and enter the IP address you obtained from Step 1. If your servers Host name comes up then you are at risk of being de-listed or rejected by the search engines.

In most cases, if your site appears on the BlackList it’s because someone else at your shared IP address or hosting service has been added to the list usually due to spamming. The best solution is to move to a different hosting service without shared IP addresses.

3. Lack of Links: According to the Google fine print, "The only way a site is included in our index is if our crawlers are able to find it by jumping from link to link on the Web. If we have not found your pages, it is because we have not encountered any links on the web pointing to your site. This is not to say that no sites on the Web contain links pointing to your site - it simply means that no sites found by Google contain links pointing to your page. If you increase the links pointing to the page, Google will likely find your site in the future."

External Links play a big role in getting ranked in the search engines. This is also the most difficult thing to obtain for new websites just trying to get off the ground. There is no easy fix here; it’ll take some work on your part to advertise your presence on the web in order to build up external links. Encourage other sites relating to the same subject as yours to provide a link to your site. But don’t spam everyone out there either, there is a right way and a wrong way to approaching other webmasters, so do some homework beforehand.

4. Bogus Links: One sure fire way to get your site 'de-listed' is to "Participate in link exchanges”  Most of those 'search engine optimization' programs that promise to "add your link to thousands or hundreds of thousands of sites" instantly is a link  exchange and  will  probably actually lower your chances of getting a high rank in the search engines. Search engine robots are aware of the 'link farms' which exist and they will ignore any sites that have used these link exchanges.  So avoid like the plague any software or service that claims to submit your site to hundreds or thousands of other sites instantly. All that will happen is getting yourself instantly “de-listed”.

5. Keyword Stuffing: Keyword Stuffing is a technique that can involve several other techniques to cloak information from the visitor to your page but that is still viewable by the search engines. Keyword stuffing usually involved crowding a page with keywords in various ways. One way is to make large blocks of text in a font color the same as your site's background color (i.e. - white text on a white background). This 'invisible' text is usually a ton of keywords and phrases in an attempt to trick the search engine into thinking your site has relevant content. Search engine robots are designed to quickly discover any keyword stuffing technique and will subsequently reject any listing  

The above list covers some but not all of the main reasons a site might be de-listed or rejected by the search engines. But they do cover the most common reasons. Google also does like objectionable topics, like racism, porn etc

Whatever the reason, being de-listed or rejected by the search engines is not good. Taking the time to review these tips and others found on this site will go a long way to correcting the problem.