In Search of Optimization

There are times when the guys at Google chooses to blacklist a website for various reasons and if you own one of these websites, then you might want to know how to check if Google really blacklisted it. There is one command that will check if your site was blacklisted and that is the “site” command.

All you need to do is:

1. Go to Google (google.com)
2. In the search box, type site:yourdomain.com

If Google doesn’t return any page then that means that the site is not indexed by Google. If you’re sure that the domain has been previously indexed then chances it has been blacklisted.

That’s how you check if Google has blacklisted your website.

How do you make yourself invisible on a Google search? While most people want their sites to come up on Google when searched, there are those for some reason who want to stay invisible. There is actually more than one way to do it.

1. You can simply request Google to remove the site from their index. More info on that can be found here.

2. Add “Disallow: /” on your robots.txt file. More info on robots.txt here.

3. Remove your website or the individual webpages.

4. The previous 3 solutions require that you have direct access to the content you want removed. In cases that you don’t, all you have to do is email the webmaster of the website containing the reference to you and ask them to remove it.

So, that’s my answer to the question “how do I make myself invisible on a Google search?”

So, how much is Google website submission? Before I answer that question, I wish to inform you that I’ve decided to put up a Q&A category to this blog for the simple purpose of answering questions about or related to search engine optimization.

Now, back to the question. Google website submission is free. To do submit your website to Google, you can do one of the following:

1. Go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ and submit your site there.
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2. Have your website linked to from another website that is already in Google.