Forum Moderators: open
[edited by: heini at 12:01 am (utc) on April 20, 2003]
[edit reason] no urls please / thank you! [/edit]
Listing your URL in your profile won't help because I believe those are only shown on profiles above "Jr"...someone else can clarify that.
Don't worry about links FROM other sites. You can't help it if slurmy sites link to you, Google knows that. I believe there have been repeated comments by very experienced members here regarding that. Good incoming links can Up you, but slurmy incoming links can't drop you, they just don't add to your PR.
The only thing Google can or will penalise you for is stuff YOU do or do not do. Things to start looking at now would be..
Make sure the places you link to do something to enhance your visitors use of your site. I personally don't think that means you have to make sure all links are directly tied into your product, but stick to a theme that would logically follow. For instance, links to Sun to download a Java virtual machine are a must for my site. Enhances user ability to use my site. A link to an online virus scanner is also offered, because my visitors do direct file exchanges, so I offer them safe computing options. Those are sites my users need, but those sites won't be linking back to me, I am not relevent to THEIR users, see?
Other than that, I'll stick to sites that very tightly conform to widgets, widget collecting, widget exchange, widget worship,and the history of the widget. You get the idea. Add links to sites that offer more information or products that your visitors need.
Read around for definitions of slurmy. Link farms, sites you know are serving anything just to get clicks, etc. Don't link to those. Ignore the 1000 that have links to you, unless you get in a mood. It's probably not worth your time to try to mail them to unlink.
As your content becomes more valuable for your viewers, you'll get linked to from other sites that serve that common market. Replacing slurmy links with really relevent links will UP you. And all that is within your power. Nice to know, huh? Trying to appease Google will probably encourage you to make a much nicer site for your visitors, which is what you always wanted to do anyway.
Dian :)
I have a client that uses frames on their site and they're PR0 too. Apparently, the spiders reach as far as the index page and no further.
By making it spider friendly, with alot of help from the posts here, it PR shoots up to 4.
Just a thought...
Ystores, if you participated in such link exchanging, especially when connected to programmmes, and software, which are known as being targeted by Google, then the case is probably clear cut.
It's one thing to have thousand bad links pointing to your site, and another thing to link back to such sites, and programmes.
You say you are not banned, you just have a PR0. It's doubtful if and when you will get the site unbanned.
My advice would be to clean your act, and try with Google to get out of the penalty box. Promote through other channels, MSN, Y!, PPC etc.
At the same time I would start building a new site, as fast as I could.
There are, I'm sure, a number of reasons to get the PR0 penalty just as there are a number of reasons to have PR0 without a penalty. Google's Webmaster Guidelines [google.com] page is useful, especially "Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations", but we need to realise that Google won't want to give us technical descriptions of what they filter for.
Mostly, PR0 penalties seem to be as a result of taking part in elaborate linking schemes or linking to a bad neighbourhood. Unfortunately, elaborate looking linking schemes sometimes occur due to highly related sites naturally cross-linking, or a webmaster who just likes to link his sites together.
ystores, I have the strong impression that Google penalties have sometimes been applied after the problem has been and gone. heini's advice (building a new site while witing to get the first unbanned) makes sense to me, but if you want to get back in you need to make sure that you're squeeky clean (no cross linking of your sites, no links to 'bad neighbourhoods').
Gheeesh!
then DON'T put up a 302 redirect on the new domain, but put use some other form of redirect which will not transfer the backlink PR from the old domain to the new one.
