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Mystery: Why (evidently) banned site is still being crawled and has grey, not white, toolbar?
Quick history:
1) client on web for years with high rankings
2) previous SEOs spammed with gateways, link farms, cloaking
3) aug-nov 2002 google generated 35% traffic
4) sometime in dec, we pulled down offensive files
5) jan 3, coinciding with update, google traffic dropped to 0, literally
Today: no sign of client site on www, www2, or www3 or google directory, though still in dmoz
Only have log files from feb 5 on. GoogleBot and FreshBot have been by. No deep crawl that I can detect. BUT, why are they still crawling after 2+ months of banning?
OR, why not reinclude with this update since we've been clean for 2 months, and the spiders should have detected that?
Why is PageRank still grey, not white?
Gurus, what say you? The spidering and grey toolbar seem contrary to the popular wisdom on this board.
[edited by: rankme at 4:13 pm (utc) on Mar. 7, 2003]
Other people disagree, but in my experience, grey bar means you are banned. White means you have somewhere between 0 and 1 PR, and you can get this out of the blue for a variety of reasons, not necessarily related to penalties. The bots visiting is a good sign - it means if you clean up your act you may be reincluded. If your site is now clean, follow GoogleGuys instructions and send an inclusion request to Google.
[added]I need faster fingers[/added]
[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 4:02 pm (utc) on Mar. 7, 2003]
You will know a PR0 penalty when you get one. New sites and no incomming PR is a reason for PR0 that is NOT a penalty. I am only answering the original question about penalties.
linking to banned sites can get individual pages zeroed
If you are linked from other sites, google's spiders will still follow those links and hit your site. If you're banned, I don't think this would affect the spider's usually crawling methods. This explains the spider activity. Bans are not normally lifted just because you have altered the site, because bans last for as longt as Google want them to.
Take korkus2000's advice and email Google.
"If you think your site may have penalties for violating our guidelines at one time, but the site has now corrected any problems, you can send an email to webmaster@google.com with the subject line "reinclusion request".
Good Luck!
Spiders dropping in through following links makes sense, and I hadn't considered that. It also would explain the lack of crawling, the way the bots hit a page and leave.
As for GoogleGuy's suggestion about seeking re-inclusion, I added the webmaster@google.com email to my address book immediately after that post :-> Since we're about to launch a completely re-designed site, I'm waiting 'til that goes live before emailing.
I'll re-post with an update when I hear more, so you all know how effective seeking re-inclusion can be (or not).
