Imagine this: You just plunked down hundreds or thousands of dollars buying a website. Sure, the website is under-monetized and a bit of a fixer-upper, but you can see that with a little optimization, you could have a very profitable site on your hands. Then, after hours spent tweaking every little detail, you add google adsense to your website and hit refresh to make sure everything looks right.
Nothing.
Maybe it just takes a few minutes for them to show up (google actually says this on the page where you get your ad code). You wait 10 minutes. Nothing. 20 Minutes. Nothing…. Uh oh. It turns out, you’ve just bought a website that is banned by google!
How can you make sure this never happens to you?
Does the Website You Want to Buy Already Have Adsense Installed?
If the website you’re interested in already has adsense ads installed on it, you’re in the clear. A site cannot be banned by google if it has adsense ads running. You may want to double check the html to verify that the ads are actually adsense and not just made to LOOK like adsense.
Search Google for the Website in Question
Go to google and type in: site:yourdomain.com. If your site has no pages indexed, the website is likely banned by google.
Don’t Buy a Website with Questionable Content
Websites that are not in compliance with Google’s content guidelines are asking to get banned. If you wish to buy a website with content that exhibits pornography, excessive violence, racial intolerance, gambling, illicit drugs, etc., just don’t buy with the intention of monetizing with adsense.
Use the Adsense Preview Tool
You can use Adsense’s ad preview tool to see what kind of ads will run. If no ads show up in the preview, the site may be banned by google. However, it could just be that no ads were available from the selected geographic region, or, the site has not yet been crawled by google’s bots.
If you don’t get any adsense ads and instead you get an error message such as “e:-2146697208″, then the site is banned by google for some reason or another.
If the website has been banned by google, but ads are still running on the site, you’ll get a “You are not authorized to view this page” error. This is actually a “HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden” error. Note that this error will only show in IE. In FireFox, you’ll get a blank page in the iframe.
Check the Website’s History
You can also check out what the webpage in question looked like throughout it’s history. It could be that the seller is trying to unload his site quickly after being banned by google. You can check it’s google cache to see what the website looked like recently.If the site was banned, you would see the same 403 error in the iframes mentioned above.
You can also check the internet wayback machine to see what kind of content has been displayed on the site in the past.
Try Using a Google Ban Checker
There are tools such as the google ban checker that can determine whether or not a website has been banned by google. However, the tool is not perfect. This tool said one of my smaller websites was banned by google, even though it is not. I am currently running adsense on that site!
As you can see, it is very important to conduct a careful due diligence study of any website before you make an offer. You must take everything the seller says with a grain of salt. As the saying goes: “Trust, but verify”.
Have you had any experience with banned sites in google? Know of any other ways for checking if a site has been banned by google? Leave a comment below.
