makemetop - 2:58 pm on Aug 24, 2000 (gmt 0)

Reasonable question - I don't truly know but on AV US and UK the URL we submitted ranked highly for months but then disappeared within 2 weeks of the client submitting their own site. We also noticed significant downgrading of other URLs which were sites we had submitted for no apparent reason apart from having a link to our site(this was only on AV UK). There were no hiccups on AV US apart from our submitted URL being removed from their database and not showing up on resubmission. My major reason for contacting AV UK was because of the possible effect of being (maybe) blamed for the spamming by our client and the knock on effect it might have on other sites being submitted by us (I could, of course, just have been overly paranoid). However within 72 hours of my contacting AV all my sites were restored to their previous rankings (some improved significantly) and the URL we had submitted for our client had been restored without us having resubmitted it. So answer to your question? Because such a radical change happened to all our results overnight without there appearing to be a big change in the AV UK algo I thought the chances of being penalized were high - the client's web designers had spammed with LOTS of hidden text - and they are a big, multi-million £ company so, not an obscure site either! After we contacted AV all sites were restored - apart from the clients site (from which we have now removed all hidden text). Could it just be coincedence? Possibly, but I don't think so.

Bottom line is that our contacting AV certainly didn't appear to have done any harm and possibly being up front with them might have done some good. Anyway regardless of the reasons let me take this opportunity of saying that I think the people at AV UK are warm and wonderful human beings!!! ;)