Congratulate Me! First Time I Got Greyed Out!

3 years of SEO and I finally got hated on by Google

[djmad_wax]

haha if I hadn't been reading this board for over a year I would have panicked. Nothing different this period, no change in technique yet for the first time my clients entire site is out of the google database!

Who's gonna pour the champagne?

mad wax

[EliteWeb]

Congrats! Let us party together :0) Could it have been that the site was down or unaccessable for a while by their bots? I changed IP's and host providers before and got the gray for a month then it came back

[Brett_Tabke]

Gray is not bad - white is the bad one. Gray just means they've dropped you. Expect to be back the next update.

[djmad_wax]

cool hope so - fortunately site visits dropped only minimally, and other SE's picked up better positioning.

*pops the bubbly*

[makemetop]

>Gray just means they've dropped you.

Hate to rain on the parade - but grey could mean they have REALLY dropped you - into the waste bin. If you had a good PR, have lots of incoming links and still have a grey-out - that's a LOT worse than a PR0! I know - I've been there!

[feeder]

I've been dropped and then re-included twice in the past two weeks. Mad.

[Beachboy]

<<Gray just means they've dropped you.>>

Brett:

OK and if I color my gray beard, they will let me back into Google? ;)

[fathom]

Hate to rain on the parade - but grey could mean they have REALLY dropped you - into the waste bin. If you had a good PR, have lots of incoming links and still have a grey-out - that's a LOT worse than a PR0! I know - I've been there!

Not really makemetop.

In this case Google would not have a reference to keep the site out?

This can be a simple google burp or inbounds links being changed to Javascript or even another site have a PR0 and pointing to you but none of these will dramatically effect google coming back around.

Any chance that someone has change robot tag to noindex?

I would wait an update or even 2 update before making any major changes.

Since traffic hasn't really been affected you have time to spare!

[minnapple]

I had a site greyed out for a one month period.
Only one inbound link (from my site) and no tricks.
This month it came back ranking high under the targeted keywords.
So I go with the google glitch theory.
Meaning it is not always your fault.

[hurlimann]

Makemetop is right. Grey CAN be the kiss of death: A human long term ban.

Rare but this is what happens.

GG can confirm this if he wants.

That said more likely to be a glitch IMHO.

[fathom]

Makemetop is right. Grey CAN be the kiss of death: A human long term ban.

hmmm... got to wonder how a human can remember thousands of "kiss of death sites".

Even if rare, you really got to wonder why, if PR0 "white" is bad why do you need WORSE?

hurlimann... how did you come to this unlikely concluding? Any examples?

[edited by: fathom at 12:32 am (utc) on July 10, 2002]

[feeder]

In the last two weeks I've had:

grey, then PR 6, then grey again, then PR 5, now grey again. That site isn't "optimized". A friend of mine is experiencing something similar, yet my other sites are stable.

What is happening is anyones guess (although probably not GoogleGuys ;)

[sugarkane]

> Any examples?

A newish (then) site was in Google, PR4 as I recall, decent links. Last October it dropped out for a month, then back in for a month, then gone ever since. Googlebot doesn't visit at all, not even for robots.txt, despite more quality links being added.

I'm not going to go into the whys and wherefores of what might have sparked this, but it sure looks like a ban to me ;)

[Marcia]

A ban can happen, but greying out isn't uncommon. White or PR1 is big trouble for certain, unless it's just bad linking in the site with pages so far down there's nothing there (I just saw one). But with grey it can mean a temporary falling out. It's unsettling - I had it happen in December because of a server problem - but it's not cause for alarm unless it goes on for more than a month.

[fathom]

Actually now that I looked many web pages are greyed out, however,
suffered a hard drive failure (and no redundancy) in the middle of googlebot's deep crawl session and was down for 48 hours.

This would justify googles greying out.

Good old "Murphy's Law" - what can go wrong, will!

[Brett_Tabke]

>I've been dropped and then re-included
>twice in the past two weeks.

Seen the same many times myself.

[wasmith]

My reading of grey is that googlebot knows nothing about the site nothing good, and nothing bad. And it can be as simple as the webhost was offline when the robot called. So their is no site to know anything about :)

PR0 can be bad, but it can also be a correct rating. It could be as simple as you have been included and have earned a PR0. But it can be worse! (the toolbar does not go below PR0) The robot knows something bad and wants to remeber your site :(

Read PR0 is earned.

[yankee]

If you had PR and are now gray, look to see if you get spidered during the next cycle. If you get spidered, then chances are it was a google hiccup. If you don't get spidered again and have some quality links, you've been banned.

[feeder]

Two Google spiders are all over my site every day (hello crawler10 and crawler11 if you're watching!), yet I got hit with the "not listed in Google" thing in the past few days.

GoogleGuy - you've got some rouge bots who aren't reporting back to base. Need to review your employment procedures ;)

[Beachboy]

Hmmmm, Wasmith, you may have hit on something interesting. You said:

"(the toolbar does not go below PR0) The robot knows something bad and wants to remeber your site."

Google might consider a red, or negative, toolbar indication for a penalty. If a temporary offense, red PR 1 to 2. Serious offense, red PR 3 to 4. Felonious offense, red PR 5 to 7. Summary execution of your website, red PR 8.

[Visit Thailand]

Good idea Beachboy, at least that way we would know quickly. I had completely forgotton that one of our sites was cross linked with hidden links.

Literally just forgot, thank god gigablast found them for me. They have now all been deleted.

All this time I was wondering why my ranking was getting lower and lower. I have a funny feeling that they penalise in stages, so they find a problem, you get penalised if it continues the penalty keeps removing from your PR until you finally get to 0.

[vitaplease]

djmad_wax

check this thread as well:

[webmasterworld.com...]

If the site shows back-links, has good robots text and validates fairly well, then you should be back soon.

[hurlimann]

hurlimann... how did you come to this unlikely concluding? Any examples?

Googleguy said on another board, in response to a spam complaint that had been posted, that he banned a couple of sites. They went from PR 6 and 7 to Grey the same day he said this. AFAICR his actual word he used was "removed"

[fathom]

I would think though that PR0 would work.

I can't see google maintaining a "27 year" history on a something that was "just removed". My opinion only and nothing to support that opinion either.

[andy04031]

2 months ago same thing with a client of me - 4 weeks out of google, gray PR and back with next update.
I think there is no standard rule for things like that. My clients site was moved to another host, new IP, during that unfortunately a few days very instable and may sometimes down, so goggle lost the track to this site.
I ask me one question - if you guys have nothing in the code that's spamming why are you always worry about PRO? Don't spamm and you can forget about PRO, there are other problems possible but they are always resolved with the next update - this is my experience and my 2 cents.

[Red5]

Anyone care to suggest why I had a PR of 5 two days ago (and 74 incomming links) and now do not appear in Google?

<snip>

I don't believe I have had any server downtime in the last while, but I'll try to find out.

[edited by: ciml at 9:38 am (utc) on July 10, 2002]
[edit reason] URL Snipped [/edit]

[ciml]

Apart from /robots.txt problems (which you don't seem to have Red5), it's usually difficult to see why a site is missing (grey PR).

The common problems are:

* The Web server was down temporarily while crawling
* DNS changes (Googlebot hits the old IP)
* Googlebot hasn't had time to crawl, index and update
* Bad /robots.txt (including 403 forbidden instead of 404 if there isn't one)

The rare problems are:

* Internet problems between you and Google
* Human assigned 'removal' penalty
* Googlebot has a bad day and forgets you

I made the last one up, but it must be possible for Google to loose a site here or there, even with their massive redundancy.

[fathom]

Red5

Thank you for taking the time to report the following link as bad:

Title: InsideOut
URL: http://www.yourdomain/

Obviously, your server was down when google crawled.

typed in your domain at google click on "contain the term"

page 2

[Red5]

WOW!

Now that was some COOL research!!! Thank you - I'd gone and got myself all worried ;-)

PS - did you notice the url of that page you referred to...

.../cgi-bin/uk/bad_link.cgi?ID=4797

I didn't know Google could parse CGI generated urls!

[fathom]

If its allowed in the cgi-bin, it will.