hbirnbaum - 1:32 am on May 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

martinibuster,

Thank you for your input. I run a clean site that is free of spammy content. This is a legitimate site that is suffering unfairly.

It has taken be over 2 years to develop thousands of on-topic backlinks from other sites that fit my theme. These are decent links from respectable web sites.

My statements are definitely truthful. I am not lying about a thing. I am just trying to get to the bottom of whatever caused this. I have read over the Google TOS several times, and I strongly believe I am following the guidelines.

I honestly do not know what the problem is. I emailed Google, and they will not comment on the specific reason the site was PR0'd. The only answer I could get is that the site is being reviewed. In the mean time, I am just about to go out of business. As a small business, we just can't hang on like this for much longer.

kaled,

I think the site is penalized because it went from a PR 7 to a PR 0. This is definitely a penalty, and not just a loss of PR. I mean I had over 8000 backlinks that still exist, but Google now displays my backlinks as 0. The toolbar is white; not a good sign. This is a penalty and not just a loss of some PR. The site doesn’t rank for things it used to do very well on.

I have had a few members of WW already take a look at the site. They gave me suggestions, and I fixed the areas they mentioned. However, these were not factors that would result in a PR0. From what I have been told, the PR0 is the result of a manual ban; meaning someone from Google actually looked at the site, and issued a penalty.

I am still not sure what caused the problem, but like I said, everything that even remotely could be a problem, has been removed entirely. I activity read WW, and am pretty confident I would be aware of spammy techniques that would hurt my site. I am not into spamming the search engines. I run a clean site that has been optimized for the long haul. I am not looking to be #1 one day, and 100+ in the next update. This web site is my only source of income, and I would not blow it by trying to cheat!

I run a clean site, and really feel I have been punished unfairly. If there is a SERIOUS problem, I would like to be made aware of it. That’s the whole point…