How Can I Tell If My Site is Banned or Penalized

Its difficult to detect penalties since those sorts of things just go into the mix of how search engine ranking methods operate and a site that ranks poorly may be penalized or simply just not ranking well for other reasons.

But an absolute ban is pretty easy to detect:

• Check the "site:" command and see if Google says it has no information on a site
• Check the "link:" command and see if Google shows no links
• Search in Google for "pages that contain" the domain name and it pulls up lots of results from pages linking to the site that have obviously been posted for several months.

If all three tests come up positive, that's walks-like-a-duck/sounds-like-a-duck evidence of a site being banned. Trying the "link:" command on Yahoo! and finding lots of incoming links when Google says "no information" is quicker, but not necessarily definitive. Search engines don't index new sites at the same time, so you have to factor in the age of the site itself as well as the age of the best quality links you can find that point to it. If both the site and its incoming links have been online for several months, and it isn't in the Google index, that's a banned site.

You can do some searches on Google for other people's opinions on this topic, and easily come up with some additional advice, but this is my general approach. Absolute bans seem to me to be pretty rare, but its never happened to me.