Rx_Recruiters - 7:28 am on Aug 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

EFV - we are not talking about losing places in the SERPs - we are talking about a total ban of the sites in the index. That is what censorship is - there is absolutely no way that a visitor has a chance to view a site via Google that was caught in the July 28 deletion.

I agree that people use search engines to determine relevancy - but Google has always used a "democratic" approach before this widespread deletion of sites. A site can (theoretically) start near the bottom of the SERPs, and as people find it and like it - and correspondingly link to it, it gradually makes its way up the ladder (paraphrased straight from Brin and Page). This can not happen if a domain is completely deleted from the index.

My site went from 10,000 refs a day from Google to absolutely ZERO. I'm not a scraper, in the ODP since 1998, permanent "original" Yahoo directory member, and 5 years of good quality, non-reciprocal links from authority sites - many PR 7 or higher. Top of the SERPs one day, then the next day (July 28) every page of my site is deleted. If that isn't censorship, I don't know what is.

An Analogy - The people voted in democratic elections, I came out on top for my key targeted search terms, and BOOM - I was "overthrown and executed" by a Google cleansing - LOL. Friendly fire or not, I'm still completely out of commision.

For what its worth and a faint glimmer of hope - I did get a response to a reinclusion request that was not a "form" reply (they included a greeting with my name that I only put in the text of the message) - they said they would forward my e-mail and website address to "the Google search engineers for evaluation"