One of the more common emails we get is from people who think their website has disappeared from Google. If you’re in a similar situation, we have some ideas for you in this article.

If your previously high-ranking website seems to have fallen out of Google altogether, you are probably teetering somewhere between panic and desperation. As friendly consultants who care about your mental health, we want you to know this first:

Don’t panic! You probably didn’t get banned.
Give this a few hours and see if it works itself out.

We say that because it’s the most common scenario that we’ve seen.  But if you can’t bear to wait around to see if the problem will resolve itself, read on.

The first thing you need to do is clarify the problem. Specifically, has your entire site been removed from Google, or has it just been knocked down in the rankings?  To figure this out, you can do a site search, by typing this into Google:

site: www.myurl.com

(replacing “myurl” with your own URL, of course).  If Google doesn’t display any pages from your site, it’s likely that your entire site has been dropped.  Another way to check is to take a unique string of text from your website, one that is unlikely to be on anyone else’s site, put it in quotes, and search for it on Google. If Google displays the page from your site that contains this text, then your site hasn’t been dropped from Google.

If your site is still in Google, but your ranks have taken a sudden and dramatic nosedive, skip down to the “What Happened to my Ranks?” section, below. If, after several strategic searches, you still can’t find your site on Google, then yes indeed, your site has been removed from the index, and it’s time to figure out why.

Unintentional Spamming?
It’s possible that your site was found guilty of spamming in Google’s eyes, and got banned. Websites can be banned for SEO spam techniques such as “white on white” text, blatant keyword stuffing, or tricky redirects. J.C. Penney’s website was famously banned temporarily for using a link-buying SEO technique.  It’s not likely that your website would be banned if you’ve never done anything to intentionally trick Google into thinking that your site deserves a higher rank than is appropriate.

If you’re not sure about your status as spammer, SEO expert Jill Whalen has a forum that discusses “SEO No-nos.” Read it to get some indication of whether your site was spamming inadvertently.

You’ll also want to check all your messages in Google Webmaster Tools.  There, Google will sometimes (but not always) alert website owners that their site has been penalized for spam.

Victim of Foul Play?
Whether you’re into conspiracy theories or not, you should entertain the idea that someone else did the spamming for you, causing your site’s disappearance from Google. We’ve seen it more than once: a site’s domain expires for a short time, and during that period, the pages are taken over by a domain squatter that displays not-so-nice content. Or, your site may have been hacked and stuffed with nuggets of spammy badness (this is especially common with outdated WordPress versions, so keep your WordPress up-to-date, yo!).

The fallout from one of these scenarios is something we describe in our case study of Providence Restaurant. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that even though that site temporarily displayed spam content, it suffered with terrible ranks, but wasn’t entirely dropped from Google’s index.)

Again, Google Webmaster Tools can help you diagnose this problem.  Check your messages to see if there have been any alerts describing malware or other problems on your site.

Another form of devious doings on the web is content scraping, which is when other websites steal content from your site and then republish it, often multiple times.  If this has happened to you, it is possible that Google banned your site along with the “bad guys” who copied you. Try doing some searches on other search engines, looking for strings of text from your website.  You just might find an unexpected match.

Redirects or Canonical Tags Gone Wrong?
We once had a client who inadvertently added  a canonical tag on every page of his site pointing to a different domain.  Google followed this instruction diligently and removed every page of his site from its index.  Yeowch!  The good news: once the errant canonical tag was removed, ranks and indexing were back where they belonged within a couple of weeks.

We have also seen examples of sites that redirect their pages to another domain using a 301 redirect, and then are surprised when their domain is dropped from Google.   A 301 redirect is like a permanent change-of-address for search engines.  If you redirect your entire domain to somewhere else, Google is not going to continue to display your domain in its search results.

Robots.txt or Robots Meta Tag Deindexing?
Have you double-checked that you didn’t accidentally deindex your entire site with the robots.txt file or robots meta tags?

Here’s the line you really don’t want to have in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

And here is a tag that really shouldn’t be on every page of your site:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Go on… check it now.  We won’t judge you.

Server Outage?
Your server might have hiccupped just when Googlebot came to visit your site recently, but that shouldn’t cause your site to be dropped from the index.  We believe that Google will check a site at least a couple of times before dropping it.   But, if the site went down for an extended period (days, weeks), this could be an explanation.

Most likely, the bot will come back and rediscover your site, and you’ll find your site back where it belongs after that.  But how long will you have to wait?  It depends on how many links there are to your site and how often Googlebot visits it. While there’s no sure-fire way to trigger a visit from Googlebot, getting some new inbound links, refreshing your content a bit, and submitting to the free URL submittal page probably won’t hurt.  You can submit an XML Sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools, which has the nice fringe benefit of telling you how many of your URLs are indexed.

In the future, if your site has anticipated downtime, set a 503 server status so that search engines will know it’s just a temporary glitch.

Reinclusion Request
If you are certain your site has been penalized for spam or malware, you can submit to Google’s request for reinclusion page. Matt Cutts of Google has posted some information on how to file a reinclusion request. But before you file a request, be very, very sure that there’s nothing spammy on your site.

What Happened To My Ranks?
If Google hasn’t actually removed your site, but you just noticed a sudden and substantial drop in rank for your favorite keywords, there are several possible explanations:

• Google could have made an intentional change to its results or its algorithm.  Panda and Mayday are a couple examples of famous algorithm shifts that blew some sites out of the water.  SearchEngineLand.com is a good place to look into industry chatter about algorithm updates.  See also our post about recovering from Panda.

• Google could be experiencing some temporary weirdness that makes the results different from what you’re used to. As we mentioned at the top of this article, we’ve seen this so many times with so many clients that this is probably the most likely scenario. In this case, just check your ranks again in a day or so . You might once again see that good rank you were used to.

• Your competitors could have gotten their acts together. OK, if your rank dropped by a few hundred spots, it’s probably not your competitors, as that would mean a lot of competitors getting their acts together at the same time!  But if you’re just being outranked by legitimate competitive activity, then it’s time for you to work on your site. And this work includes optimizing for, and tracking, additional keywords.

• Is there something funky going on with your homepage, but not other pages?  We’ve seen sites that have suffered big rank drops because their homepage had been deindexed due to redirect or canonical issues, and no other page had as much power as the homepage, so no other page on the domain was making it into those previous ranking spots.  If you’re seeing only a portion of your site in the index, run through the diagnostic steps above to see if you can figure out why.
• Is your website new?  Sometimes, websites show up in search results briefly after being launched, but then seem to drop dramatically out of the rankings after a couple of days, and are stuck in the depths for months.  It’s a phenomenon that some have called the “Google Sandbox.”  How to get out the sandbox? Get some inbound links to your site, and be patient.

• Is it possible that something has dramatically changed on your website? Say, you intended to update a single page but accidentally changed the page titles on every page of your site?  Don’t forget to check your site and make sure everything is in order.
• Could you be seeing different results because your personalization has changed?  We’ve known people who thought their ranks were phenomenal – only to be brought down to earth when they realized that the ranks they were seeing were personalized just for them by Google.   Read more about Google search personalization.

Hopefully we’ve given you some ideas about how to track down the source of your site’s disappearance from Google. Regardless of what you find, it’s always a good idea to make sure you’re offering lots of great content that makes people want to link to your site, and do some link building. In this way, you’ll have other sources of traffic that makes a Google problem like this less devastating.

Q: We have tons of great videos on our website. How can we get those little video thumbnails that sometimes show up in Google search results?

A: When Google understands that there is a video presented on a web page, it will often display a thumbnail as part of the search result for that page, as shown here:

(The exact layout of your results may vary, since Google is constantly tweaking its video result display.)

For the best chance at getting video thumbnails for your pages, you should embed videos on your site in a way that Google can easily recognize AND send Google as many signals as possible indicating that you have a video on the page. Here are some tips that can help:

• Include each video on a separate URL
• Embed your video in Quicktime or a standard Flash video player.  Google can’t crawl through a complicated Flash file, so if you use Flash, so we suggest using the built-in Flash video component for FLV playback using a hard coded URL path to the FLV streaming source (it’s OK if this is an off-domain location).
• Create a Google Video Sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools: click here for Google’s video sitemap instructions.
• To add even more signals that Google can read, tag the videos using RDFa: click here for Google’s video RDFa instructions.
• Use Video OG tags.  These are intended for social media, but Google sees them too, and we’ve seen clear evidence that Google will recognize video information in OG tags. See more about how to use Facebook OG tags.
• It is OK to host your videos on streaming service such as Brightcove.  However, you will probably be on your own when it comes to generating a video sitemap or well-formatted OG tags.

Video SEO is changing fast! About two years ago, video thumbnails were dominated by YouTube and Metacafe.  These days, YouTube still has a dominant role, but other domains are presented among the featured thumbnails more and more.  Watch this blog for updates in this quick-moving space.

There have been two major developments in search over the past few weeks.

Bing Takes Over Yahoo!’s Organic Search Results.
Over the last few weeks, Bing’s merger with Yahoo! has progressed into the much-anticipated next step: Bing’s organic search results are now powering Yahoo!’s results. Our rank checks now show identical results for our client’s sites on both Yahoo! and Bing. Bing is now estimated to have approximately 30% of the organic search market share.

What this means to you: stay the course of holistic SEO, but get verified in webmaster tools
Both Google and Bing evaluate similar factors when determining organic search results. For example, text optimization, quality inbound links, and crawler-friendliness are valued by both search engines. So, should you dive in and spend many extra hours learning every detail about Bing’s algorithm? Probably not. We think it’s better to approach SEO holistically, with a many-faceted approach that includes solid on-site optimization, content and link building, tightly focused targeting, and compelling conversion paths.

One sensible way to react to this development is to get verified in Bing’s newly enhanced webmaster tools service. This will give you insights into Bing’s interpretation of your site, and can alert you to problems that might affect your site’s indexing in Bing.

Google Implements Instant Search
See it in action while searching Google, or read Google’s official explanation. Google is now delivering results that change as you type. For example, type in “W” to see weather results. Continue typing “wa,” and the top result will change to Walmart before you hit the Search button.

What this means to you: Keep an eye on Google Suggest
Google Suggest, (Google’s auto-complete feature that provides suggestions as you type in the search box), is becoming more important as a driver of search queries. As one example, you may be ranking well for the singular variation of a keyword, but Google may feature the plural version in the Suggest box, which could draw searchers away from typing your preferred keyword variation. As another example, Google may suggest your product list to searchers in a different order than you would prefer.

Google Suggest tends to be driven by a combination of keyword popularity and newsworthiness. In other words, search behavior is a very strong contributing factor to the phrases that Google suggests, and there is very little that can be done to influence Google’s suggestions directly. (As an aside, Google says it filters out certain words that it interprets as “pornography, violence and hate speech.”)

The takeaway? Make sure to review Google’s suggestions as part of your keyword research activities.

What this means to you: Understand how ad impression data is affected.

From Google Support:

When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:

*The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
*The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter or selecting one of the predicted queries.
*The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

You may begin to notice additional ad impressions for shorter-head keywords than you have received historically. You may also see an apparent reduction in click-through rate to your site.

SEO pros are long accustomed to rolling with changes in search! Enjoy the new normal – it will undoubtably change again, and soon!

Q: We have a successful website in Australia, but we are thinking of moving to a US-based host in order to take advantage of lower rates. I’ve heard that this might affect our Google ranks in Australia – is this true?

A: Google (whether Google.com.au or Google.com in Australia) will typically do its best to match the country of origin on a website to the location of the searcher.

There are many ways that Google might try to figure out where a site’s home country is, and these include:

* the domain country (.fr, .au, .uk etc.)
* geotargeting as set in your Google Webmaster Tools account
* hosting server location.

If your target audience is located in Australia, we suggest that you try to match all of the above with your target audience. However, our guess is that as long as the first two bullet points are matched to your home country, the hosting location won’t be an issue.

Read more about this on Google’s blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/10/better-geographic-choices-for.html

Dynamic content used to be a red flag for search engine friendly design, but times have changed. Search engines now include dynamically-generated pages in their indexes, but some particulars of dynamic pages can still be obstacles to getting indexed.

Whether it’s keeping in synch with inventory or updating a blog, more than likely if you’re a website owner you have some level of dynamic or CMS-managed content on your site (and if not, you should really be looking into it for your next redesign). Follow the guidelines here to avoid major pitfalls and ensure that your dynamic body of work is search engine friendly from head to toe.

Rule #1: Be sure that search engines can follow regular HTML links to all pages on your site.

Any website needs individually linkable URLs for all unique pages on the site.   This way every page can be bookmarked and deep linked by users, and indexed by search engines.  But dynamic websites have an additional concern: making sure the search engine robots can reach all of these pages.

For example, suppose you have a form on your website: you ask people to select their location from a pull-down, and then when people submit the form your website generates a page with content that is specifically written for that geographical area.  Search engine robots don’t fill out forms or select from pull-down menus, so there will be no way for them to get to that page.

This problem can be easily remedied by providing standard <a href> type HTML links that point to all of your dynamic pages. The easiest way to do this is to add these links to your site map.

Rule #2: Set up an XML site map if you can’t create regular HTML links to all of your pages, or if it appears that search engines are having trouble indexing your pages.

If you have a large (10K pages or more) dynamic site, or you don’t think that providing static HTML links is an option, you can use an XML site map to tell search engines the locations of all your pages.

Most website owners tell Google and Yahoo! about their site maps through the search engines’ respective webmaster tools (Links: Google Yahoo!). But if you’re an early adopter, you should look into the new system whereby a site map can be easily designated in the robots.txt file using sitemap autodiscovery. Ask.com, Google and Yahoo! currently support this feature. Cool!

Rule #3: If you must use dynamic URLs, keep them short and tidy

Another potential problem – and this is one that is subject to some debate – is with dynamic pages that have too many parameters in the URL.  Google itself in its webmaster guidelines states the following: “If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.”

Here are a few guidelines you should follow for your website parameters:

• Limit the number of parameters in the URL to a maximum of 2
• Use the parameter “?id=” only when in reference to a session id [this is no longer a problem.]
• Be sure that the URL functions if all dynamic items are removed
• Be sure your internal links are consistent – always link with parameters in the same order and format

Rule #4: Avoid dynamic-looking URLs if possible

Besides being second-class citizens of search, dynamic-looking URLs are also less attractive to your human visitors.  Most people prefer to see URLs that clearly communicate the content on the page.  Since reading the URL is one of the ways that people decide whether to click on a listing in search engines, you are much better off having a URL that looks like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/church-bells/discount/

rather than this:

http://www.yourseite.com/prod.php?id=23485&blt=234

We also think that static-looking, “human-readable” URLs are more likely to receive inbound links, because some people will be less inclined to link to pages with very long or complicated URLs.

Furthermore, keywords in a URL are a factor, admittedly not a huge one, in search engine ranking algorithms. Notice how, in the above example, the static URL contains the keywords “discount” and “church bells” while the dynamic URL does not.

There are many tools available that will re-create a dynamic site in static form.  There are also tools that will re-write your URLs, if you have too many parameters, to “look” like regular non-dynamic URLS.  We think these are both good options for dynamic Intrapromote has a helpful post on dynamic URL rewriting.

Rule #5: De-index stubs and search results

Have you heard of “website stubs?”  These are pages that are generated by dynamic sites but really have no independent content on them.  For example, if your website is a shopping cart for toys, there may be a page generated for the category “Age 7-12 Toys” but you may not actually have any products in this category.  Stub pages are very annoying to searchers, and search engines, by extension, would like to prevent them from displaying in their results.  So do us all a favor and either figure out a way to get rid of these pages, or exclude them from indexing using the robots.txt file or robots meta tag.

Search results from within your website is another type of page for which Google has stated a dislike: “Typically, web search results don’t add value to users, and since our core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally exclude search results from our web search index.” Here’s our advice: either make sure your search results pages add value for the searcher (perhaps by containing some unique content related to the searched term), or exclude them from indexing using the robots.txt file or robots meta tag.

Bonus Points: Handling duplicate content

While it’s not a problem that’s specific to dynamic sites, this rule is one that dynamic sites are more likely to break than static ones. If multiple pages on your site display materials that are identical or nearly identical, duplicates should be excluded from indexing using the robots.txt file or a robots meta tag.  Think of it this way: you don’t want all your duplicate pages competing with each other on the search engines.  Choose a favorite, and exclude the rest. [Editor's note: we no longer (2009) recommend de-indexing duplicate content. A better approach is to either redirect your duplicate pages to the primary page using a server-side, 301 redirect, or to set up a <link rel="canonical"> tag for any page that has been duplicated. A good explanation of best practices for handling duplicate content in 2009 can be found at Matt Cutts' Blog]

Dynamic content is usually timely and useful, which is why users love it, and the search engines want to list it. And now you know how to help your dynamic website reach its full search engine potential.

Q: The listings for my website don’t look very good. The titles and descriptions are weak in the summaries captured by these search engines. I have tried everything: writing new descriptive text on the page, correcting the meta description and page title, but the SERPS are not responding to the changes. The titles and summaries always stay the same.

A: Here are two possible explanations for the problem you’re having:

(1) Your listings may be showing titles & descriptions culled from directory listings rather than your page HTML Title & Meta Description. To find out your site has a listing on Yahoo! and Open Directory, try searching within those directories. Open Directory can be found at www.dmoz.org, and Yahoo! directory can be found at http://search.yahoo.com/dir . If the listings you see in those directories match the titles & descriptions that have been bothering you, then you’re in luck – this is an easy fix. In order to stop Google & Yahoo! from showing directory titles & descriptions in search results, you simply add a tag to the <head> section of the page instructing them not to do so. The format of the tag is this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir, noodp”>

The next time the robot visits your page, this change should go into effect and you’ll see your own titles & descriptions (or snippets from page content). For a full list of tags that you can use in the “robots” meta tag, see our page: How to Use the Robots Meta Tag.

(2) Another possibility is that the robots are coming to your site so rarely that you aren’t seeing your changes in place in a timely manner. This is possible if your site has no – or few – links pointing to it. To find out if this is your problem, you can do two things: look at the cached version of the page listing, by clicking on the small “cached” link that shows up in your Google listings. Here, you will see a date when Google last gathered the page. You can also find this information by signing up for Google Webmaster Tools and looking at the indexing statistics from inside the tool. If it turns out that your problem is a lack of visits, your best bet is to increase the number of links pointing to your site.

Use these search shortcuts to turn your favorite search engine into a high-powered SEO research tool!

Google

Search for sites linking to a URL: [note: Google does not list all linking sites. For a more fun list, sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and view links to your site within the tool.]

link:http://www.yourseoplan.com try it now

Search for pages with a certain phrase in their HTML Page Title:

allintitle:”Handy Search Shortcuts” try it now

Search for related sites:

related:http://www.yourseoplan.com try it now

Search for all pages indexed within a website:

site:http://www.yourseoplan.com try it now

Search for all pages with a certain word in their URL:

inurl:search try it now

See more Google Search Shortcuts on Cyberwyre.

Yahoo!

Search for sites linking to a URL: [note: this search and the site: search below will be redirected out of standard Yahoo! search results and into Yahoo!'s Site Explorer]

link:http://www.yourseoplan.com try it now

Search for pages with a certain phrase in their HTML Page Title:

allintitle:”Handy Search Shortcuts” try it now

Search for all pages indexed within a website:

site:www.yourseoplan.com try it now

Or you can do this the “old-fashioned” way and stay within standard Yahoo! search results rather than going to Yahoo! Site Explorer: go to Yahoo! advanced search, enter your domain as yourdomain.com in the box next to “only search in this domain/site:” and enter a word that you know you have on every page of your site into the search query box (we use “SEO”). try it now

See more Yahoo! Search Shortcuts on Yahoo

Bing

Search for pages linking to a URL:

site:http://www.yourseoplan.com try it now

Search for outbound links from an entire domain:

linkfromdomain:http://www.yourseoplan.com try it now

Search for pages with certain words in their HTML Page Title:

intitle:”Handy Search Shortcuts” try it now

Ask

Although Ask has a relatively robust menu of advanced searches, it has some restrictions that make it slightly less handy for the average SEO trying to learn more about their own site. Notably, there are no search options for linking sites, and you have to include a term along with the advanced search query. So, for example, you can’t just search for all the indexed pages on your website — you have to search for all the indexed pages on your website that contain a specific term . (Here, we use the word “seo” because we know that every page has that word on it.) Here is an example:

Search for pages indexed within a site:

site:www.yourseoplan.com seo try it now

Search for pages with a certain phrase in their URL:

inurl:”yourseoplan” try it now

Search for pages with a certain phrase in their title:

intitle:”your seo plan ” try it now

Search for pages containing a certain phrase that have been updated within the last week (the “last updated” searches available on the other big search engines start at 3 months):

“seo” last:week try it now

Q: I have a brand new website that already ranks well on Google, but I have a problem. Currently, the page being returned by Google is the ‘About’ page, which is not ideal. The key landing page is the Home Page. I am now thinking that I should perhaps take the ‘About’ page out of the SEO equation altogether – perhaps with a no-index, no-follow tag. Is this a good idea?

Essentially – I’m trying to figure out how to get my Home page returned in Google in place of the current ‘About’ page. Can you help?

A: We don’t recommend removing a high ranking page from robot indexing. Assuming this page contains robot-friendly links to other pages in the site, this page is transferring authority to the other pages, including your home page.

Since your site is new, it’s probably only a matter of time until the Home page makes its debut in the search results. In fact, you could probably just wait a few weeks and let this whole problem iron itself out. However, if you are feeling impatient, here are some ways to address your problem:

1. First, check that the Home page is indexed. Perform a “site” search on Google, following this syntax: site:www.yourdomain.com. (see our handy search shortcuts page for more on special searches such as this one).
2. If the Home page is not shown in the site: search results, add a text link pointing to the Home page from the About page. Next time the search engine robot comes around, it is likely to follow the link and discover the Home page.
3. You can also sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and check for indexing problems and make sure that Google isn’t having a problem with your home page.
4. If the Home page is, indeed, indexed, but just isn’t getting ranks compared to your About page, take an honest look at the two pages and ask yourself: does the About page contain more descriptive text? Juicier, more keyword rich text? Is the home page dominated by flashy graphics and not providing content that search engines can sink their teeth into? You may need to adjust your design if you want the Home page to have a better search engine presence.

Whether you take the above steps or not, we always recommend thinking of every page on your site as a potential landing page. So, if you’re not happy with the About page as a landing page the way it is now, go ahead and add great content to make it a better destination for your search visitors. Here are some ideas for making an “about” page a good landing page:

• Include a nice, juicy description of your company, offerings, and principals
• Add a call to action and a link such as “learn more about our services!”
• Make sure there’s a prominent link to the home page
• If you have a prominent company logo in your page header, make sure that it links to the home page as well – most website users expect this.
• Add a footer with contact information, and possibly even a short and snazzy tagline that describes what you do, who you serve, and why you do it well!

In the long run, your link-building efforts (which are great for SEO in general) are likely to improve your Home page’s ranks more than other pages on the site, since there’s a good chance you’ll get more inbound links directly to your Home page than to your About page. You could have worse problems – keep up the good work!

Q: I know I have a lot of other sites linking to mine. But when I do a Link:mysite.com search on Google I only see a couple. What’s going on?

A: We’ve probably received half a dozen emails this year asking the same question. The answer is simple: Google does not show all of the links to your site (also called backinks and inlinks). It doesn’t even show all of the links that it knows about.

Adding to the confusion, MSN stopped showing backlinks in early 2007 – in fact MSN Search no longer supports the “link:www.mysite.com” format at all.

But don’t despair! There are several ways that you can gather intelligence about links to your website (and that of competitors):

• Using the Yahoo! search engine, search for “link:www.mysite.com” (no quotation marks). Here’s an example. Yahoo! will take you to its Site Explorer, where you can review inlinks to an entire domain or to a particular page. Site Explorer is Yahoo!’s equivalent to Google Webmaster Tools, where you can submit a site map, view last crawled date, and a other features.
• Speaking of Google Webmaster Tools, sign up, get verified, and this fab tool will provide a comprehensive list of inlinks to your site. Google’s popular engineer Matt Cutts has posted an explanation of how you can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to view all of your backlinks.
• A few geeks in shining armor have built backlink checking tools that you can use online. Try these on for size: We Build Pages Backlink Tool, SEOMoz Page Strength tool, Aaron Walls’ backlink analyzer, Backlink Watch.

Lastly, to answer another commonly asked question: Are links really all that important? You bet they are. Shun Google and MSN — and use more accurate tools for backlink checking — to know just where you stand.

Sometimes, you just want to hide from the world. But hiding is not always so easy for a web page! Here’s how to request removal from search engines.

In Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, we explained the basics of using a robots.txt file to control which pages on your website are indexed in the major search engines. Here are page removal instructions directly from the search engines themselves:

Google

The quickest and best way to get a page removed from Google is to sign up for Webmaster tools and use the URL Removal tool.

• Read the Google FAQ about the URL Removal Tool
• Read the Google FAQ about removals in general
• Go to Google’s automatic URL removal page. (You may need to hit refresh after the page loads.)

Yahoo!

• Yahoo!’s instructions regarding URL removal.

Ask

• Ask does not currently include a feature allowing webmasters to request page removal. However, you can ask them not to crawl your site using the robots.txt file or a robots meta tag.
• Read Ask’s Webmaster FAQ

Bing

• Read Bing’s instructions for website removal