martinibuster - 12:15 am on Jul 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

Folks, the site in my profile had the gray bar removed within a week and got it's pr back. The directory that simultaneously was gray-barred continues to be banned from Google's index.

1. Dynamic or static pages?
SE Friendly PHP pages. Fully indexed

2. How long were they online?
Six months
3. How many pages?
Around 200 pages

4. How were they originally seeded?
By hand, by me.

5. Were they free inclusion or paid listings?
Free. I took submissions, but the majority of the listings were put in by me, many of them by wandering around the neighborhoods and writing down business names.

6. Were they reciprocal link directories?
Nope.

7. Template based – what changed in your template besides <title> tags and listings when going through the categories?
I changed part of the feel, added banner to an affiliate site

8. How many listings per page?
four to eight listings

9. Was there other content besides the directory listings?
Nope. I hand wrote all the titles and descriptions

10. Did you offer/use ROS links?
I offered nothing to no one. It was purely a labor of love done by me over the period of several months. I was in no rush to turn a buck with it.

11. What was the PR before they seem to have been penalized?
Pr 5

12. If you used an off-the-shelf script did you change the default paths etc?
Yes, totally changed the paths, as my directory was a general directory.

I exchanged links with three or five relevant sites. The vast majority of links are all outbound with no reciprocals.

This directory was keyword heavy, as it was in a niche. I can imagine someone looking at the first page and thinking it was spammy because it has a lot of keywords on the home page, like
widgets blue
widgets green
widgets purple
etc.

Which is why I'm fairly certain it was a hand ban. It's on it's own ip, so it's not like the bots made a mistake indexing the site, either.

It was ranking like crazy for five days then the lights went out. I'm inclined to believe that in my case, it had something to do with the google.eval knuckleheads.

Hey, that's life. Weird things happen. I'm not whining about it. I have never whined about it, and I'm still not whining about it. This happened several months ago, and I'm just now mentioning it as an example of a directory that got slapped with what to me appears as a hand ban.