My 24-Hour Google Ban
December 18th, 2007 Posted by ChanyaAlthough the blogosphere has its share of Google-bashers (related to AdSense, Adwords, Analytics, Page Rank, etc.) I wonder how they’d fare if they had to go an entire day without Google Search. I just found out.
On Sunday I came across a cool keyword tool called SERPs Finder. This free tool lets you enter search terms and see how well your site ranks against those keywords. It searches Google, Live Search, and Yahoo.
So I thought, for giggles, I’ll download it and search my site for the keyword “blog tips.” I was curious to see what would happen if someone went to Google and searched for “blog tips.” At what point would they come upon a link for my site?
I knew I’d be buried pretty deep in the search engine results pages (SERPs) but again, I was simply doing this out of curiosity. The tool informed me that my site shows up around page 120. Clearly, no one is ever going to find my site by searching for “blog tips”.
I then searched for the term “blog humor” followed by the term “random musings.” Needless to say, I ranked even lower in the SERPs for those terms. However, that wasn’t too surprising for me because I’ve only recently started paying attention to SEO issues (thanks to great blog advisors like Grizzly from Make Money for Beginners).
Oh No, Where’s My Google?
Once I was done using the tool I decided to do some online comparison shopping (for Christmas gifts). Imagine my surprise when I attempted to search for “Kenneth Cole Shoes” and received the following error message:
Huh? What happened?
I immediately began running Ad-Aware, Spyware Killer, and Norton Anti-Virus, thinking my system had been infected. After Norton ran (it didn’t find anything), I thought, hold on. I don’t think this is related to viruses or spyware. I’m still not sure about this, but logic dictates that this error was directly related to the SERPs Finder tool I used. Since that tool crawls through Google search pages I’m assuming Google thought I was running some sort of automated scraping program, or a bot. All I know is that I was banned from using the Google search engine for about 24 hours.
The next day I was able to use Google search but it was scary thinking I’d been permanently banned. Sure, I could always use Yahoo, but I’m sorry folks, there’s nothing that compares to Google search in my opinion.
Does anyone know of a keyword tool that doesn’t cause a Google “banishment”?
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 4:20 pm and is filed under blog tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
My 24-Hour Google Ban…
Could you survive 24 hours without doing a Google search? No? Well I did. Not deliberately mind you, but because Google banned me from using their search engine.
I’ve been thinking lately that I should start a series on my site called “What Not to…
Hi Chanya,
Thanks for the nod, you’re very kind and it’s much appreciated. In relation to your ban - Google can detect automated searches and manual search strings that are looking for certain results. If they detect you they will ban you for 24 hours - these search strings can tie up a lot of bandwidth and you can imagine how slow things would be if everybody taxed Google by running these programs. Usually you can get away with the odd query but if you use it too much you get banned. If you want to spend the money SEO Elite will track your keywords and it has never got me banned - it is pricey though.
Thanks again for the mention and stay clear of that program.
Griz
Griz: Thanks so much for the advice. I was hoping you’d weigh in on this subject. I just checked out the SEO Elite website. It looks like a powerful tool. I’ll look through their videos - perhaps that will be my Christmas present to myself!
Google is just too damn powerful.