Google Ban Checker Tool Available

One factor that helps to determine the search engine ranking of a website is the quality of the sites that it links to. It's important not to link to websites that are themselves blacklisted in some way. There's a great free tool available that can help you determine if any of the websites that your site links to have been banned by Google (a strong indication that the site has a very bad reputation).

The tool is a free downloadable Windows-based program called "Google Ban Checker". It finds links by crawling your enter site, a single page on your site, or multiple pages on your site. If you prefer, you can manually add a list of outbound links to be checked.

When you run the program, it checks to see whether or not any of the linked sites FAIL TO APPEAR in Google's index. If a site is not found in the index, the program assumes that it has been banned, and flags it as a banned site.

IMPORTANT NOTE: New sites may be flagged as "banned". If the program checks a link to a relatively new site (one that has not yet been indexed by Google), it will flag the site as banned. So before you take action based upon the output of this program, you'll want to check to make sure that sites flagged as "banned" have been around long enough to be discovered and indexed by Google.