If you enter a website's address into Google, and it does not come up when searched, that website is either (A) not yet indexed by Google or (B) banned from Google. You could also use a tool like this:
http://www.selfseo.com/google_ban_tool.php

Take care.

If you have a google toolbar the page rank bar will show the site rank in a gray bar, your site stats will drop like a dead horse and sometimes your H page will still display though not often and indexing won't do any good at all. You will become a ghost. The easiest way to avoid being banned is to work within their rules. Do not try to outsmart them. Google gives excellent advice on how to flourish within their system at their site.

Yikes - another way to read that would be Agent Sex Change Links.com - That's what I saw when I took a look at the URL with no capitalization.

Eric Rogers - Century 21 Pro-Team
Aurora Real Estate , Geneva Real Estate , Batavia Real Estate
Real Estate Link Exchange

Also, I think something is broken - I registered yesterday and got my activation over E-mail but when I try to login it still indicates that my account is not activated.

yeah me the same, i tried to join a week ago and still havent got the email back yet

I joined, we'll see what happens!

To the person that asked about checking if a site is banned or not, you can check google using one of these two command operators:

site:domain.com
(replace domain.com with the domain you want to check) and it'll show you pages from that site that google has in their index.

link:domain.com
(replace domain.com with the domain you want to check) and google will show you a sample of links it knows about to that site.

Google will not show all backlinks to a site, and with good reason. If you have a competitor that wants to beat you in your SERP, they'd simply get links from the same sites that link to you. Google doesn't want to make it easy for people to cheat like that.

If your site is ranking well in the SERPs, you've more than likely done something right in order to get there and the less help the blackhats get, the better off you are.

If you haven't checked into Google sitemaps yet, you should because it'll tell you pages on your site google has had errors with, or 404s if the pages aren't there, and even if there's a lag time for page request because of a slow server.

I came across this forum because I was indexing some real estate sites in my directory. I'm not a real estate agent -- I'm a programmer and web designer and know this stuff really well.

This seems like a nice forum, so I joined, and maybe I might be able to help someone out.

Anyway, nice to meet all of you, anyhow.

Deb-

I'm the one who posted that inquiry - thank you so much! And welcome to the group!

Betty

Thanks, Betty.

I had a look at your site -- not too bad. Did you do it yourself?

You're missing your doctype tag and the charset tag, though. Those are both needed, and the body tag should all be on one line.

There's something I'm curious about ...
Since I'm in the den of Real Estate Agents, what better place to ask this question than that?

Agents have websites displaying houses they're selling on the market. They're using the Internet as the medium to generate interest and sort of pre-screen potential clients.

How many (if any) of the homes any of you sell are to persons with disabilities?

By this, I mean -- people who're wheelchair bound, or perhaps blind/low vision?

There's a reason that I ask this. It's a two-parter. After (if) any of you respond to the question, I'll move on to the second part.

I have a lot of friends in real estate and they're all doing their sites just like many here have.

Thanks Deb-

I have done a lot of the content myself, but the basic website is through homes.com. I had the main page concept in mind and they created it.

Now this totally lost me! I know just enough "geek speak" to make me dangerous!

You ought to repost this part in the Agents/Brokers thread. I think you will get a lot more response over there. (I have had clients with limited mobility, but not wheel chair bound.)

Now I'm off to shovel myself out of the house and then I'll be back to check out your sites!

Thanks again,
Betty

Hi Betty,

LOL. Yeah, the snow is hitting us hard today also.

OK, the doctype is the first tag in the very top of a webpage and tells the browser how to display the page.

The charset tag tells the browser what character encoding set to use.

You're using basic HTML so I'd suggest using HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype and since your page is in English and we use Latin characters here you'd use the

charset=ISO-8859-1

charset tag.

You can find the proper doctype example here:
W3C Schools doctype

The site in my sig (the directory) uses the same charset I suggested for you. You can just view source on my page, and copy the tag to get the correct format. However, mine closes like this:
/>
Because I use XHTML. You'd simply remove the forward slash and space and end the tag as follows: >
because you're using standard HTML.

RE: The sites in my sig -- the directory site belongs to me. The forum site is one where I'm a moderator at and it's an SEO forum.

A lot of the stuff I've been talking about with regard to doctype, charset, and so forth, is covered in-depth over there. There's also a web review forum where you can ask for a review and folks there will help you with getting your code corrected and validated.

Simple question regarding SEO.

I have a blog. In my blog I often copy and past an article from another site - ie. from local newspaper - as a post for people to read. (I give credit to the original source of course but this is not the problem) My question is, does this hurt my SEO ranking - I've been reading through a lot of the topics and some have mentioned that posting exact info for other sites is bad and google would look down on it etc.

Also, is it better to have blog seperate from your website - and have links to each OR have the blog as an actual page on your site. Is one idea better then the other for SEO ranking etc.

If your site consists of nothing more than content that also lives on other sites, then yes, it would cause harm to your site because it's what's called "duplicate content."

The search engines (and directories) want to index sites that are unique.

Yes, Google does frown on this practice and it's why they have a duplicate content filter. Your site won't be banned or anything, it just won't rank as well because there's nothing there that's original for the bot to digest and understand.

No site is immune to this, not even a web directory. Many times the site owner will submit their site to several directories using the same description at each and every one.

If the directory uses the owner submitted description without changing anything, and all of the other directories the owner submitted to, also use the description without changing anything, then we now have several cases of duplicate content.

Now, then also, if these are duplicate content across all of these directories then the search engines will only give weight to one of those and ignore the rest. So, the site owner is losing out.

That's why when submitting your site to a directory you should always change the description a little for each one you've submitted to. Many directories won't change the description at all, but in my own directory -- we always change it and never use the description submitted by the owner for the reasons I've already stated.

Having your blog on your site is much better than having it separate from your site because it gives the bots that much more content to work with. Google likes big sites and the more content your site has the better it will do in the SEs because you'd have more visibility with having so many pages.

I just down-sized my own site quite a bit because it was becomming too big. We had over 50,000 pages and it was all unique content. My directory has been online for 9 years now.

Have a read around in the SEO forum listed in my sig. There's a wealth of info there and if you have any other questions, you can join the forum and ask away. People there are very helpful and very friendly. The advice you'd be given is always best practices because it's what we all believe in over there.

Matt Cutts from Google (a.k.a., Googleguy) is a member and so is Adam Lasnik. Both of them are very nice people.

I'm member "WebSavvy" over there.

so to prevent from being punished for duplicate content, would it be enough to for example:

split up the article by adding some personal comments or insite at the beginning, middle or end of the article?

Deb - good to have you on this forum. I just joined yours and am looking forward to it.

I also come from a technical background.