Bobby_Davro - 9:10 pm on Feb 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

I am fairly certain that Google is now developing new methods to deal with unwanted (yet perhaps higher profile) sites, to minimise their impact on the SERPs. After the recent cries of webmasters who have been suddenly dropped (SearchKing for example), I think that Google are trying a new tactic now.

I won't give a specific example, but I can tell you that one site had pages dropped from the index every day for two weeks until it was down to just the front page. The PR is intact (and it is a high PR site).

This is clever by Google, because it makes it much harder for webmasters to complain. Firstly their site *IS* technically still in the index, although only a single page. Secondly, the PageRank is still there, so no more claims of PageRank zero penalty. Thirdly, the pages were removed over time, so no sudden drop offs to look like a hand edit. Google just got sneaky.

Be ready to see more sites disappearing in this way; this is the new Google penalty I think.