Imagine you’ve already gone through the process of search engine optimisation, and have manoeuvred your pages to where you want them in the rankings. You perform your regular daily or weekly check on the rankings of your pages, but for once the obsessive watch has paid off: your pages have disappeared.

There is the possibility that your site has transgressed in some way and the search engines have taken offence. It may feel like Google personally hates you, but the likely scenario is that your pages have been filtered out or dropped because they’ve triggered something with the algorithm. If this is the case, then you need to know what to do, and when and how to do it.

Have you really been banned?

This is an important question. Many businesses panic when their site disappears from the search engine results pages, and rightly so. It’s a situation no site wishes to be in. Time is needed, however, to determine whether the lack of inclusion was just a glitch or whether it was in response to perceived rule-breaking. It’s also not always easy to determine whether your site is actually missing from the index.

If your pages aren’t appearing in the results pages, or your PageRank metre has altered significantly, give the situation time to settle. If you are still concerned, it can be helpful to consult a professional, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult.

What’s your crime?

If you’ve gone through the search engine optimisation process, you should be familiar with the unwritten rules of the search engines. If you’ve consulted professionals during the SEO process, it’s unlikely that anything you did broke those rules, although there is an outside chance. There’s also a chance that a hacker has found their way into your code and laid some nasty spider traps, or that something you’ve done during SEO maintenance might have triggered a filter.

The best thing to do is check your files. Having a logging process for the changes on your site will make this check easier. First of all, check your security to see if there have been any serious attempts to infiltrate your site. Next, look at the changes you’ve implemented, in reverse order of implementation. Last, do a manual check of the site, doing things like highlighting each page to check for hidden text.

You should be looking for the usual things that trigger search engine filters, like keyword stuffing, link spam and cloaked information. If you reach the end of your checklist, it can be a good idea to get back in contact with your SEO company or another professional that you trust.

If you’ve been penalised, don’t panic

Traffic from the search engines is extremely helpful to your website, but losing it for a few weeks is not the end of the world. Penalties can be recovered from. The important thing is to track down the reason for the penalty, and begin a conversation with the search engines about re-inclusion. Like every other aspect of SEO, patience is the key to winning this waiting game.

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