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When we looked into why it ranked so high, we found that a large part of it came from my sig line in the phpBB forums. I am an uncurable phpBB addict, and support phpBB by buying mousepads, etc from the phpBB store and giving them away to members. I belong to several forums - and none of my membership in forums is intended to create pagerank. Indeed, by all rights phpBB should not be giving off PageRank insofar as it should not be indexable because of the session ID's in the URLs.
To penalize the site due to links in sig lines is to penalize forum membership. If Google looks on these links as SPAM, they should disregard them. In fact, since these links were not put on the pages by the owner of the phpBB, I feel that Google SHOULD disregard them. Most members of our forum put their website in thier sig line - and if Google PR Zero-ed all of these sites in sig lines, dmoz, yahoo, and even Google would be PR0.
My site should not have PR7 due to sig lines - neither should it have PR7 due to sig lines.
It should have PR7 due to the fact that it is listed in several directories including dmoz, JoeAnt, GoGuides, and others. Several members have placed links to the site on thier index pages, and the site has a good number of links from PR7 and PR6 pages. It earned PR7 w/o the forum sig links.
Now, GoogleGuy has said:
I know your site is clean--been there before. I'll investigate.
If it weren't for GoogleGuy noticing my post, I think my site would remain in PR0 hell forever - due to an undeseved penalty. I'm thinking that there should be more communication between Google and webmasters before penalties are handed out. "Before" is the keyword here.
cheers!
I didn't look at www3, but by my count all but 3 of the links Google shows to your site are from forums and guestbooks.
Last I knew, DMOZ was neither a forum or a guestbook. And several of those links are site that I provide free hosting for. As I said- Google can go ahead and ignore those, and I still should have PR7 from all the PR7 and PR6 links from other sites(not forums).
You have a PR7 on my toolbar right now.I think it's just fluctuating back and forth. I'm getting PR1 most of the time, and occasionally it flips back to the previous PR7. ... I'm sure GoogleGuy will take care of it.
These things happen now and then, I had pr0 for a month once, very scary to think of all your work being wasted, but it came back the next update. Googleguy seams to be interested in this case so I think you can be assured that he will do all he can.
Hope this is of some reasurance.
Yes, it is a great relief. I was actually throwing up sick after I noticed what had happened, and having GoogleGuy look into it is a great relief.
I'm still digging deeper, mosley700. Looks like the domain lapsed for a while? Current creation date is listed as December 3, 2002, which is pretty recent.
GoogleGuy, hope I can jump in here with a question based on the above. I recently found that a registrar that was bought out by another registrar and "pushed" all the domains to the new registrar internally as part of the transfer-of-power process reset ALL the "Creation" dates for the domain to the date on which the internal transfer happened!
In other words, the domains could have been registered in 1998 or 1996 or whenever, but they still show a date in 2002 as the "Created" date.
Does that mean that all these domains are now under suspicion by Google?
More info on the expired domain filter:
[webmasterworld.com...]
We just dont know how PR is calculated, even though we do take good guesses (e.g. one less than the highest PR page that links to you) However there may be parts of the formulae that "modify" your PR due to other reasons, your new directory links may not be spidered by Google yet, or Google changes their algo monthly..
You are in an extremely competitive area where there a couple of leaders and a host of smaller and new followers, and your BB seems to use long dynamic URL's. I guess it would be hard for Google to rank a lot of these sites which by nature have very similar content.
My guess is that you had a "new sites bonus" last month. I have noted over the past few updates that new sites in my own areas get a very high relative rating the first time they are listed and then fall back on the next update, to gradually rise up.
So i guess im saying that guest book and forum links being penalised may not be the only possible reason.
You say you were surprised by your position in the first update you appeared in. That may well speak for itself.
I know a fall from 7 to 1 (or 0) will make you feel "gutted", but can you really EXPECT a PR7 on first entry or even for the first few months even with the amount of directory listings you have?
It is great that GG is taking a personal interest in this, as as far as I'm concerned the less "surprises" with Google updates the better - either good or bad! So any info GG can pass on may help us all understand the vagaries of page rank...
The previous owner was a German fellow who runs a German webmaster forum. I only found two links to the site from the time he owned it, so I really doubt that is the issue. He only used it for a short time and then let it expire. I did not even know it had been used before when I bought it.
From experience I feel that most discussion boards and guest books allow hard coded links mainly to encourage people to visit, to build up a reasonable level of community fast.
Apart from that there are so many negatives to allowing automatic user-inputted urls that they would normally overide the advantages (getting more visits from people who want to advertise their sites, building up a hub with useful links etc) Allowing people to leave their URL every time they post surely is overkill. A url in a "profile" page should suffice surely?
Personally, I never put my url in postings to boards just for these reasons, that there is a slight possibility that it may change the theme reputation or natural internal linking patters of our sites, or might even be misconstrued as spam.
That is a good point that you bring up. I do not disable session IDs for Google. I do this because I don't want Google indexing the interior pages. Nobody in my forum will get any PR from the sig lines.
If you notice, we have a very strong community, and spammers are spotted and killed on spot. A lot of our members post very useful, valuable posts, and the sense of community is very great. The sig lines are, to me, like clothes. I like to know exactly how I am talking to, and I usually look at the site just to better get to know that member.
There are definate pros and cons to sig lines, but I've chosen to allow them, and most users (even admins of other reputable forums) use them in the forum. Of course, we do end up banning some people because the post just to get thier sig line in front of people.
"I'm still digging deeper, mosley700. Looks like the domain lapsed for a while? Current creation date is listed as December 3, 2002, which is pretty recent."
Do recently registered domains get a bad treatment from Google? Just a few days ago I transfered my domain from one registrar to another and also registered it under a company name instead of my personal name for protection. Does this mean that I will be suffering next month?
Thanks
Joe
My site went from a PR5 to 0 over this last update, even though I don't think I've made any design changes. I use the Geeklog CMS and new content is added, but the actual design has probably remained static since October. I still have sites linking to me...but for some reason Google has put me in the doghouse.
[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 8:39 pm (utc) on Mar. 10, 2003]
[edit reason] TOS #21 [/edit]
I too have run into the same problem with my site this update. My site was developed and launched at the end of December using a domain name that I registered in December 2002.
I was jumping in and out of the index during the month of January and finally stuck after the Jan. update with a PR5. I was in the index all of Feb. until the update over the weekend and now I find that
most pages have a PR0 and a couple are a PR2.
When I do a search for my site (ie. www.sitename.com), I see that I am still in Google but I don't come up for any of the keywords that searchers used to find my site.
I made a few very minor changes to the site such as fixing spelling mistakes and adding a couple of informational pages. I also added a few links (PR5 / PR6 quality)... I'm pretty sure that I didn't do anything "spammy" that could have triggered a PR0, although I am reviewing my code just to be sure.
Although it is disappointing, I'm just going to hang tight and see if the next update clears things up. Hopefully it will...
This is really a test of patience and sticking to it hoping that it turns around. If it doesn't, I'll just have to move on, although it would be nice to know what may have gone wrong, so that I learn and improve.
Thanks for reading!
GCN
When I do a search for my site (ie. www.sitename.com), I see that I am still in Google but I don't come up for any of the keywords that searchers used to find my site.
gcn,
That's exactly what I see. I'm quite sure that my code is fine ... I'm using a pretty popular CMS/blog and I don't think I've made any code modifications. In a couple of days I'll send out the re-instatement email request (just in case). In the meantime, I'll see what googlebot does when it visits.
You started out with a PR5 with the deep crawl only a few days after your site went up.
Do you know how many really good links you lined up before the first deep crawl? If you didn't have any that you know of, it was probably links in to the previous site at that domain.
Did you get those PR5/6 links before the February crawl? If not, you may have to wait till the March dance to see the results of those links.
