different kinds of penalties

[qwerty03]

My site is on the net for some time and had a PR5.
Two days ago my PR went grey. When I checked the google cache for my page, it was nowhere to be found. Same with "site:mydomain.com mydomain.com".
Needless to say that I receive no traffic anymore.

Is this a penalty or something else?
I always thought a PR0 was the typical kind of penalty.

But from my weblogs I can see that I am still deepcrawled.

Could the new hidden text filter be that cause?
I used <h1> often, but with my css it just looked like bold text.

Has anything like this happened to anybody before?
What can you make of the timing?

[BigDave]

PR0 is a penalty or a site with PR < PR1. The site is still in the index, so a search on "site:mydomain.com -asdfjkl" will return the pages of your site.

Grey bar means that you are not in the index. This is the usual result of a manual review where the site has been banned, not just penalized. A search on "site:mydomain.com -asdfjkl" will return no pages.

There are many other reasyons that you could have a grey bar, but getting caught IS one of the reasons.

You mention your (ab)use of <h1> tags. Do you use them in place of <b> tags? If you are using that sort of trick, what other tricks are you using? Do you think using your <h1> tags this way gave you an undeserved boost in your rankings?

[jaski]

Hi qwerty03,

I think its nothing to worry. Even I have a site all of whose pages (100 or so) suddenly vanished 4 days ago from google index but my PR is unchanged. What I see now is my older links which are actually dead and were there till the last update.

I think they have some kind of glitch back there. I feel it should be back up any time.

Jaski

[vnsampat]

Hi,
I had a site with a PR 6 and 170 incoming links till yesterday. Today the google toolbar is Gray. when I check for incoming links it still show 170 on google, but the cache shows that the page doesnt exist.

I have been deepcrawled around 7 hours back by the googlebot.

So what may have gone wrong? Has the last crawl seen something that has caused it to drop my pages? Generally I get the bot crawling on the website every 2/3 days. So how many days do you think before the PR and rankings return?

Let me know
thanks
Vishal.

[tigger]

People have been saying the toolbar has been acting a bit odd over the last few days, so don't panic yet.

Oh Welcome to WebmasterWorld :)

[vnsampat]

thanks tigger.

but why would the pages disappear from the cache, even if the toolbar has been acting wierd? It still shows my incoming links. Would they come down to zero as well?

[trillianjedi]

They've rolled the index back to last months (or earlier) cache. That's as far as I can make out, although maybe something more complicated going on... (probably is).

It's not just the toolbar, google has been a bit strange for a couple of days.

Wait for freshbot to come back around and update the cache.

TJ

[qwerty03]

It looks that many pages just disapeared from the google index and got a grey PR.

So I am not worried anymore about my site. It is unpleasant, but should resolve by itself.

What are your guesses when such a site will be back in the index?

Next update/dance? Or will google be able to correct the probvlem midcycle? So they even care? (Maybe it only affects 5% of the index and this is accaptable to them.....)

Can we get an "official" confirmation for a glitch?

[vnsampat]

The problem occured mid cycle, so I presume it should be fixed without another refresh. However what if it does'nt get fixed? What options does one have?

Vishal.