Simply do a search for your unique company name. If it is not the First position you have acquired the Google Error as I like to call it and NOTHING will change that. Don't waste your time attempting to follow the advice geniuses, because they are all just speculations. Once you get the Google Error hitting your site, forget it.

IMHO

Couldn't disagree more... on a number of occasions my site has dropped out of the index and not been findable by Googling the actual name of the website, but it has always bounced back.

Just my 2 cents.

If you are banned - then no pages from the domain will show up anywhere. Any other situation may indicate a penalty, an SEO challenge, or a Google bug. If you have a Sitemaps (Webmster Tools) account, Google sometimes will give you notice there if you are tripping a penalty -- but not always.

<<<site has dropped out of the index>>>>

dropping out of the index and having unique company name depressed in the Serps are 2 differnt things totally

<<<<Google sometimes will give you notice there if you are tripping a penalty>>>>

Ohh How I wish

Do a site:http://www.mysite.com search on Google.

Zero results - Google death. Non-zero results - some kind of Google penalty.

>>>>>Do a site:http://www.mysite.com search on Google.
Zero results - Google death. Non-zero results - some kind of Google penalty.<<<<

I think "google death" is a little strong. I have seen banned sites come back and I am about to start on resurrecting one now.

If your site is banned I think you need to do a reinclusion request. Helpful if in the request you can guess what went wrong and indicate what you have done to fix it.

I know that's not always easy. It's sort of like challenging a traffic ticket, except G is both citing officer and judge, and you aren't allowed to see the ticket to know what the charge is.

do a

""www.sitename.com""

(note the 2x " before and after)
I believe that if you site does not come up first you are under penalty.

Way fo checking this? ""www.bigsearchengineurl.com"" ... it always comes up first and when I do searches on my own site which have had a penalty for some 2 years or so now I never come up first!

I had a query since long. Suppose I have two websites widget1.com and widget2.com having similar content ( read duplicate website ) and if I write a robots.txt file to disallow spiders from spidering widget2.com , Am I still violating Google guidelines.

Thanks,
Copper.

Those who are banned have better luck at getting restored with a reinclusion request than those that have a manual
penalty imposed. That my friend is the unfair skewed aspect of all this.

Actually, when you're checking to see if your site is in the index at all, try it both ways:

site:www.mydomain.com

site:mydomain.com

(just in case)

do a

""www.sitename.com""

Okay, when I do this, my site's home page is listed on the fourth page of the serps. This site has suffered since Allegra. Quite a mess and most of it is still supplemental after a 301 re-direct from non www to www.

Do you think this site is under an actual penalty or is this the after-affects of the canonical problem? (The site had all original content and was copied, scraped, etc.)

I gave up awhile ago but I do get quite frustrated at times. :-(

>>>>my site's home page is listed on the fourth page of the serps.<<<<<<

penalized with no hope of having it removed...

I mentioned some time ago that there appears to be a "page 4 penalty", we have had this for nearly a year with no honest idea why. Y and MS are fine and display our results as expected and fairly.