SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Big G already notifies select webmasters of issues that lead to penalization in their search engine through their Sitemaps program. Webmasters using obvious spammy techniques will not be notified under their Sitemap program.

In addition to using the Google Sitemaps tool to see if a site’s been banned from Big G, there’s a free software tool available that runs right from your desktop. In addition to checking whether a site is cached with the “site:” command, it also checks sites that link to you to determine if they have been banned as well.

I love free tools, especially ones that have a very intuitive interface and are clean. There are many rank checkers out there. If you plan to check rankings of sites regularly like I do, I highly recommend Agent Web Ranking. It lets you run rank checks for multiple projects and for multiple keywords and returns accurate positions.

The Website Metrics Reporting Tool returns data from 16 of Google’s Data Centers, MSN and Yahoo. Other information included are PageRank, backlinks, last cached date, and indexed pages. You can enter two keyword phrases at once and it returns the positions within the top 100 results for each of the search engines.

Duplicate content can cause rankings to drop especially if a large percentage of content is found elsewhere on another site.

Here’s a handy duplicate content analysis software tool that crawls your entire site and analyzes all your pages for duplicate content. It returns the similarity percentage for all pages of your site. The higher the percentage, the more likely the page is similar.

The analysis software is not meant for large websites but rather small and medium sized ones.