Site unavailable/Banned

[jsprague]

Hello,

I have read the Google FAQ and searched the forums and learned a lot about penalization and banning by Google.

One of our sites recently went from a PR 6 to a PR0 and has completely been removed from Google altogether. I have been trying to figure out why this has happened and have come up with 2 possibilites/questions?

1) Our site was hacked 3 times during December (including Christmas Eve). After each of these incedents, our site was down for several hours. What if Google had tried to spider our site during one of these periods of downtime? Would they remove us completely from the index thinking that our site no longer existed?
2) On the home page of the site, we have sold text links at the bottom of the page to quite a few sites. Several of them have nothing to do with the content on our site. What may be worse than those links are subdomains that we set up for another company. Basically, we have set up computers.ourdomain.com (for example) with a DNS entry that points to their site. I am a businessman/webmaster, not an SEO specialist and I had no idea what they were trying to accomplish with this, but we sold them the package anyway. Could this have got us banned?

It would be really cool if someone could look at our site, but I don't know if anyone would be interested or if that would be allowed here.

Thanks much,
jason

[diamondgrl]

The former is not a possibility unless the hacker did something other than simply take your site down. The search engines deal with outages all the time.

As for the latter, that could be a very very serious problem. If you were linking to "bad neighborhoods", i.e. sites that had been banned by Google, you probably were seen as part of that bad neighborhood. Sorry to say but you might be out of the game. So are these sites you linked to also PR0 and how long have they been around? If a long time, they should have had PR.

[jsprague]

Thanks for the reply! Most of the text links that we sold at the bottom of the page were new and had no PR when we first linked to them and the same with the subdomains we created. After a few months, I think most of them had a PR because of our links. Now most of them do not anymore, particularly the subdomains.

I did notice today that Google spidered the site for almost 8 hours. If we were banned, wouldn't Googlebot just skip over the site?

I also finally convinced Google's support to escalate this to their engineering group, so hopefully someone will tell us what happened.

[pipster2004]

Had the same thing happen to one of our sites...
was using a backfill from a search provider, and have a clue this is the issue!

[jaffstar]

2) On the home page of the site, we have sold text links at the bottom of the page to quite a few sites. Several of them have nothing to do with the content on our site. What may be worse than those links are subdomains that we set up for another company. Basically, we have set up computers.ourdomain.com (for example) with a DNS entry that points to their site. I am a businessman/webmaster, not an SEO specialist and I had no idea what they were trying to accomplish with this, but we sold them the package anyway. Could this have got us banned?

I suspect that the above could be your problem. Google does not like this.

And as said above, you can't control who links to you , but you can definitely control who you link to. You could of linked to a bad neighborhood.

[kaled]

Given that your site has been hacked, have you checked your robots.txt file?

Kaled.

[jsprague]

I suspect that the above could be your problem. Google does not like this.

But if we were banned, it does not seem logical that Googlebot would continue to spider our site. It has been there pretty much constantly for the last few days..

Given that your site has been hacked, have you checked your robots.txt file?

Do not have one, although, I should probably get around to doing that. :)

[MarkHutch]

It may not seem logical, but that does happen. We had a PR0 site once and googlebot visited it all the time even though it could not be found in the listings. The only way to find it was to enter the entire URL into the search box.

[jsprague]

Ours can't even be found by entering the URL into the search box.... It is completely erased from Google.

[JudgeJeffries]

Same thing happened to me, PR5 zapped. The site/host had been hacked and was dowloading a virus to all comers. I presume this is the reason for being MIA but no one else seems to have had a similar experience.

[jsprague]

How were you hacked? Was it the PHPBB hack that has been going around? That is what happened to us, but doubt this is why we lost our PR.