Is Your Site Being Blocked?!

Google announced that beginning March 10th users would be able to manually block Web sites returned in searches from ever showing up in their personalized results again.

This also throws up a huge red flag on how it will effect your site long term in the regular search results. We say this because Google clearly indicated that they used results from the report this site feature to reconcile the sites that were hit the hardest by the Panda update. If people are blocking your site in large numbers you will be added into the category with other blocked sites and Google will begin to factor that into their algorithm.

This just reinforces the fact that you need to make sure your Web site comes across looking professional and unoffensive in the regular search results. At this point there doesn't seem to be any way to tell if your site has been blocked unless it happens across the board and you see a drop in your rankings.

That being said when we attempted to test this weeks after the announced release the block button still hasn't shown up in any of the different browsers. Here is the image Google released that shows what the blocked button will look like when it is available: