Big_Gig - 5:17 am on Aug 8, 2005 (gmt 0)

Hey all,

Sorry it took so long to post this... My site was banned, and then reincluded in the google index.

I was likely one of the first ones to see that my site was totally banned from google - not just a penalty and pushed way down in the serps, but totally banned...

So, being one of the first to notice the ban, I was likely one of the first to write to google support. I contacted them through the web form on July 28 - not through the email address. Within a couple of hours I received the canned response of "you may be a dummy and your site just might be way down in the SERPS." I responded to the email, as instructed, and politely asked for an explanation as to why the site was penalized. On August 2, I received a response from google. "We understand your concern and have passed your message on to our engineering team for further investigation." On August 6 my PR was back to full strength - traffic started flowing from google once again.

There are still issues, we do not seem to be totally restored to our previous SERP positions (yet), and we're showing only about 1/3 the previous amount of indexed pages... This, in my opinion, is the proper response from google.

In theory, any particular site (directories included) may have some dup content, might have some re-print articles, probably has a recip directory with links that appear on 1,000 other recip directories. DO NOT BAN THE SITE! Just penalize the site, and let the site owner understand that something else needs to be done. In my opinion, a banning is deserved only by those that game the system, that play dirty. People that put up good sites should be rewarded for it, people that put up bad sites should be penalized, and people that try to cheat should not be tolerated. This group seems to be made mostly (a few good and bad apples aside) of the second group - people that should be penalized - NOT BANNED.

Just my 2 cents - and it's worth what you paid for it...