Which is a ban - Grey Bar or White Bar PR0

netnerd, I can tell you all my banned domains are gray bar

Be careful. A site without any inbound links and never indexed will also show a gray bar on the homepage.

littlecload how many sites exactly do you have banned?

Banned domains are white bar!

Banned domains are grey bar. PR0 penalties are white bar.

Both are bad.

Grey bar does not necessarily mean that you are banned, it just means that you are not in the index. PR0 does not necessarily mean that you have a penalty, but if you have several good incoming links and you are still PR0, then it probably is a penalty.

Its a grey bar - my contact confirmed his site was banned and went grey.

Not necessarily. When my site was in the dumpster it went back and forth between white and grey. It was always in the index, just so far down it wasn't "findable".

I don't think there is consensus on the meaning of white PR0 and grey.

The reason you were getting the flux between white and grey is because you were getting found by Freshbot and included in the index. That would give you a white bar.

Then you'd get shuffled out, as Freshbot results were shuffled out, hence the grey bar. Getting a couple of pr 4+ backlinks should stop that kind of behavior.

my site recently went from VERY good results to completely unindexed, and I can confirm that my bar is grey. i'm pretty sure i got yanked, although not sure what for.

It's been awhile since I've been back, but I think it shuffled back and forth between white and grey even when there was a fresh tag date.

I have yet to see a definitive answer to this as there have been so many varying results for different sites.

A grey bar can be either be a new site not indexed yet or a site that has a penalty the same as a PR0

Most new sites will show a grey bar I've 2 new sites like that

PR0 = PageRank less than 1 > or penalised

Grey Bar > not yet ranked > or banned, or a hic-up (server down-time etc)

A grey bar does not always mean not indexed, there are many grey-bar pages appear on the serps.

The page may have been indexed but not yet assigned a PR figure.

I have a site that was down due to a severe hosting problem for almost two months....I couldn't regain rights to my domain....yadda yadda yadda......Anyhow.....
The site has been back up over two months now, and it still has a grey bar.

Could this be a penalty of some kind? It is showing up pretty well in serps, but has no PR......It just seems strange to me that there wouldn't be "guesstimate" PR.

Any ideas?

In summary...

PR0

1. Possible penalty.
As mentioned above, if you have quality inbound links and the site has been indexed, then a penalty is most likely the cause.

2. No inbound links. Or, poor quality inbound links (PR2 and below).

Gray Bar

1. Not indexed yet.
As mentioned above, new sites may start off with a gray bar since they have not been fully indexed. I usually give it one to two major updates before you'll see established PR.

2. Site unaccessible.
If your site was down during a major crawl and you had PR prior to the crawl, that means Google was not able to determine PR and hence the gray bar. I should note that it is possible you will still maintain positions with a gray bar. I've experienced this with a client site that is not hosted on our server and they went down due to domain expiring.

3. Manual penalty.
My understanding is that there are times when Google may institute a manual penalty (by hand). If this happens, you are most likely doomed. I have no real world experience on this one myself, but I've seen it happen to others.

I have a grey bar on one of my pages but not on the site, I think it's because Google think it's a duplicate.
Most pages are still PR5.

I re-arranged the structure and skipped my first index.htm page and instead moved people to my main.php directly, thus, www.url.com now points to main.php instead of index.htm as before.

main.php is now greyed, but www.url.com is PR5. (The same content).

Whenever I encounter gray and white bar, I differentiate whether the sites are banned and not banned by the following ways and I think they are quite accurate:

1) Gray Bar

If NOT BANNED: no backlink found and probably new sites

If BANNED: Backlink found, but none of the pages indexed. In short whenever you encounter gray bar site, try "Backward links"

2) White Bar

If NOT BANNED: if allinurl:www.domains.com return pages that have been indexed by Google. Simply this happens to pages that have not gained enough links.

If BANNED: if allinurl:www.domains.com return NONE of the pages

ncsuk, I had about 50 domains banned for hidden links and text I think. I fixed them and sent in a reinclusion request so we shall see how long

i recently ratted out an "invisible text" spammer. He was a PR0 (white bar) with one very weak incoming link but was ranking about No. 12 on major keyphrase. However, once I told Google about his invisible text he went to grey bar and now is completely out of the index.

I had a site for a long time with a PR0 simply because it had no incoming links. Once I received quality incoming links it went to PR4 so... the white bar can just mean you have no popularity (i.e.) LINKS.

The reason you were getting the flux between white and grey is because you were getting found by Freshbot and included in the index. That would give you a white bar.

I don't think that this is true, drewls. The only time I have ever seen a PR change on a page is when the indexing happens once a month. Freshbot can get you listed, but won't give you any PR (even a 0).

That's just from my own experience anyway :) I've never been on a 0 though, so couldn't say whether things are different then!

A page with a

<META NAME='ROBOTS' CONTENT='NOINDEX,FOLLOW'>

meta-tag seems to get a gray bar.

My site has several good links PR5 and up and is a white bar. It has only been up for about 3 months now however. allinurl:www.mydoamin.com returns results and we place well on the SERPs but still no PR. Also link:www.domain.com returns no links and the same with link.all:www.domain.com.

If there is a penalty I have no idea what for but I dont see why we would still be placing so high in keywords. Please let me know if you guys think there was a penalty or if I just need to wait to get some PR and links to show.

All the web shows a bunch of links for link:www.domain.com also!

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin,
We are in the exact same boat with numerous links in alltheweb but non being "found" by Google. How long have your incoming links been out there for Google to find? Ours have been 3 months.

Hey guys,

Hoping someone can help.

I showed up with a grey bar on my mainpage about a week ago. I still have about 20 backlinks showing for the page though.

There are 3 or 4 pages on the site with a grey bar. I'm not sure if it is a penalty or not. The only reason that it COULD have been is due to interlinking because it is a "website design" site with portfolio. All of my client's pages had a link back to mine. I had thought this was okay from what I had read, but apparently not. I fixed this (since it is the only "borderline" tactic used)

How do I try to get reincluded if this is indeed a penalty?

stuntdubl,

see this post from GoogleGuy

[webmasterworld.com...]

make sure you are squeaky clean before you email them Good luck :)

It's hard to know what is what on gray and white bars right now. The update procedure seems to be doing crazy things to it all. Check out
[webmasterworld.com...]

So does that mean HP`s site is banned or penalized? :)

cheers
viggen