Q and A: Has our site been penalized by Google?

Dear Kalena...

An excellent website! have found many useful articles in the "ask kalena" section.

I was curious as to whether our website www.simondelasalle.com has been penalized for some reason. We have recently changed our navigation from image based to text links to increase the amount of keywords on the page. Is it possible this website has been "sandboxed"?

It looks like Google's indexing of the site is weak compared to MSN. Any feedback you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time and have an excellent day.

Simon

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Simon

Thank you for the coffee! The caffeine is greatly appreciated.

I've had a look at your site and the first thing that strikes me is that there is no Google cache for many of the pages. Your home page has a healthy Toolbar PageRank of 5 out of 10 so there is no penalty. Next, I entered your URL into Google's new Site Status Tool. Bingo! I found two problems:

1) Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Jul 29, 2006 (which explains the caching issue).

2) Google does not know about all the pages of your site.

I'm not sure when your major re-design occurred, but if it was around the end of July, then it's highly likely the site has since been sandboxed, as you guessed. Best course of action is to prepare and submit an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps using a free XML sitemap creator and wait till Googlebot travels your way again. After verifying your site with Google, you can check if Googlebot struck errors during his last crawl.

Good Luck!

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