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That does, however, leave me with six sites still affected. Some have the "Classic Penalty Poo" of 3-4 on the homepage and 0 on the internal. Two of them I created in 1999 and have lots of links to/from them.
My advice is to e-mail google a few times a month asking to look at your sites. I'm sure they do look at such requests but time limitations only allow them to help now and again.
I'm hopeful that by Jan 2003, everything will be normal again for me - marking a whole YEAR outside of the index for the sites because of my bloody stupid cross-linking last December ! :(
1) pr before was much higher.
2) the vast majority of inbound links are still there, and they are legitimate links - i.e. logically, they SHOULD produce the pr that it was at before.
3) internal pages are pr0
Again, this is NOT a case of "u just think you should have higher pr" it really does seem like a penalty, based upon a very informed examination of the link structure of these sites before and after.
If anyone who suspects a penalty can find a page that links to them with PageRank two notches higher on the Toolbar (and without a very large number of links on it), please let us know. No URLs please, just an indication that the link exists. We can't prove a negative, but we can try to find a definitive example.
I checked my site in this unfortunate category and it has at least two PR6 links, tons of PR5 and PR4s. It ranks well below sites with very few sites, new sites, etc.
nutsandbolts. Congratulations!!! Your rather groundbreaking post seems to have slipped by unnoticed, but surely that is some kind of breakthrough?
Did you just do the email thing, or did you ban googlebot and remove the site from the index?
Nice one.
Cy
Often the link:url does not show incoming links anymore. I don't know why this is, but if you use +www.yoursite.+com you will see that you have 444 incoming links. This may include internal pages.
Yes, I read that you had 300 incoming links the last time Google showed your links. I merely wished to point out that there is more than one way to determine a site's incoming links.
So, if I get you right, because these incoming links do not show through a link:url search, this is indicative of a penalty, and downgrades your PR? That would sound reasonable enough, except if you were not being credited for any incoming links whatsoever should your site not be PR0, or even greyed out?
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Oh yes. I see in your first post you mentioned that the PR3 might be as a result of your DMOZ link. But should that not have to show in a link:url search to be valid also?
You misunderstood my last post. The page you are checking links on must have a PR of 4 or higher. The page you are checking links on has a PR of 3, so Google will not show any links for it, even though it has many.
Why do you think it is a penalty? Was the site ever a higher pr?
Yes, it was a strong PR6 before the PR0 episode. Now it's a weak PR4. It is literally the lowest PR site in its directory category except for sites listed with no or zero PR. This is despite 500+ links in Google. I scanned through a few pages of links - the largest number were PR4, quite a few PR5, and a couple PR6s. (These are the PRs of the actual pages with the links.) The reasons mentioned by others are also present - very low PR on internal pages, etc.
I wonder if Go Madrid could be right - Google recognizes the links, but doesn't count them. I don't see how that would account for the internal PR issue, though.
As I said earlier, I still have 5 other sites with this problem (I mean, come on, I ain't one of those 15-500 domain kinda guys!) but I'm sure eventually things will be back to normal. Fingers, toes and ears crossed.
So, was nutsandbolts the only low-PR-penalty site to see significant improvement this time around?
That's not a penalty. That's google changing it's algorithm. Most links from guestbooks are not counted in PR calculations, although some slip thru the cracks and do get counted. So some of the links you have probably were counted in the past, and are no longer counted. That does not mean you have a penalty on your site. It means you need to get better quality links.
If you still need convincing, sticky mail me and I can give you a list of several quality PR6 and PR5 pages that link to the site and are included themselves in Google. These are *not* guestbook links.
