What Google said about my PR penalty...

I just wouldn't let it lie.

[CromeYellow]

Hey ya'll, how's tricks?

It's been a while since I noticed any posts on my pet peeve, the PR0 penalty, so I thought I'd let you know what a real live human at Google said about one of my site's PR penalty.

Background

In case you didn't know by now, I've had the classic PR penalty since last November on the site in my profile. There's more history here...
[webmasterworld.com...]

The Reply

Anyway, I finally emailed Google this month, and much to my amazement, I got a reply within a week!

Noting the rules on not reprinting emails, I'll paraphrase what they said for you:

Me: Mt site's been penalised! Why?

Googs: Nah, your site's already listed.

Me: Thanks, but that's not what I meant - here's what I meant - yada yada...

Googs: We've had a look at our logs (!) and you're not penalised. You've got a pagerank of 3.

Me: Thanks again, but that's just plain silly, I've got loads of links from high PR pages. Before the penalty I was PR 6.

Googs: Here's a big autoresponse, go away politely.

And that's all folks!

The Conclusions

1) Unless there is some problem with my site that I am not seeing, it only warrants a Pagerank 3 (now 2) in Google!

2) Or, the guy at Google got it wrong. Don't misunderstand me, I'm pleased that Google replied at all - after all, theirs is a free service, and I have no 'right' to traffic from them.

But it still looks like they got it wrong. No?

Strangely enough, it looks a lot like PageRankOne's reply about his penalty [webmasterworld.com].

Does Google know what's going on with it's own index?

Best of luck to anyone holding out for recovery.

All the best

Cy

[nutsandbolts]

He must be one of the top engineers, if not THE head guy, to have the authorisation to remove penalties from sites - like he did with one of mine. God bless him ;)

[JayC]

He must be one of the top engineers, if not THE head guy, to have the authorisation to remove penalties from sites

Hmm... in the thread [webmasterworld.com] referenced earlier, read message #32:

ranking the web would be a lot easier without the help from SEO. I'm backing off mainly because it hit more mom and pop domains trying to do their own optimization.

(emphasis added.)

[mr_dredd2]

i think danny is really onto something. for those of us who know we have a bonafide pr3 "problem", this is the way to start thinking about it. could there be anything in the algorythm that is holding a previously long term pr5/6 site that had been pr0'd at pr3?

i'll have to think about that..

the bad side to this theory is of course that no google employee is going to "lift" this pr3 effect - it would technically be the same as artificially boosting an ordinary site in the rankings.

[GoogleGuy]

Hi ChromeYellow, I tried to look into this. Did you just add these meta tags?
<meta NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="noarchive,nofollow">
<meta NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">
That's pretty much going to exclude google from your site--not sure if that's what you wanted?

[nutsandbolts]

That's pretty much going to exclude google from your site--not sure if that's what you wanted?

Oh Blimey! I didn't notice those Meta Tags.....

[GodLikeLotus]

ChromeYellow,

What is this????????????????????

<meta NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">

WHAT CAN YOU SAY, I DON'T THINK I WOULD USE THAT TAG

[djmad_wax]

I've often been confused about all the page rank business that goes on around here, but I will tell you guys that I've never worried about PR, just optimized sites in the old fashioned way with good content and keywords/titles, and have been getting plenty of traffic for my chosen keywords through and through.

I guess theres a lot to it, but I'm too lazy :P to try to figure it out. I run one site (hobby) that I've never optimized at all - and its sitting at PR 6. *shrug*

my main concern is google dominating so much of the SE game now, but thats another topic.

cheers!

waxy

[CromeYellow]

Oh.

My.

God.

Speechless. I'm spinning a bit because I sure as hell didn't put them there. Think I'll go and change my FTP password.

Guys, what can I say? Thanks Googleguy, thanks to everyone else, and I'll stop typing now in case I swear.

Added: Just checked my history and they weren't there 2 months ago. We'll see what transpires when I remove them. I have been getting the typical obscure words - low PR traffic from Google so I was definitely indexed. And had a PR of 2 - not a greyed toolbar - doesn't that mean I'm in the index?

[martinibuster]

Uh.. Never mind.

[ann]

CY,

I just had a thought.

Maybe your hosting company's admin put them in there because googlebot was using up too much bandwidth and interferring with their servers??????

I don't know how large your site is but I read where someone else had googlebot interring with the server....soooo, maybe......

I would check and see if I were you.

Ann

[CromeYellow]

Thanks ann, but the site's hosted with a big server. I think I know how it happened - an over-zealous friend who has been helping me with the site. I'm waiting to hear from him :)

[Jane_Doe]

I have been getting the typical obscure words - low PR traffic from Google so I was definitely indexed. And had a PR of 2 - not a greyed toolbar - doesn't that mean I'm in the index?

I don't think you can go by PR to see if a page is indexed. I put a noindex tag as a test on a couple of PR5 pages on one of my sites a couple of months ago just to see what would happen to the PR. They still showed up as PR5s after the next Google update.

I did a search on your URL index page name in quotes in Google and I didn't see it in the return results. I only saw sites linking to your index page and a couple of interior pages for your site showing up in the returns. I tried the same search only with my index page URLs in quotes for a couple of my sites and both the index pages came up either at or near the top of the returns. (In one case a high PR site that links to mine came up first before my index page). So I suspect this means your index page is not in the Google index if it is not showing up in the return results even for the exact name of the page.

Anyway, I'm glad that Googleguy could help you out, CY, and that maybe your site is on the road to recovery.

[CromeYellow]

HI Jane

We're definitely indexed:

[google.com...]

So it looks like the tags thing didn't screw things up. Which leaves us back where we started, unless Googleguy's turned something up.(At least my mate is off the hook!)

Anyway, I'm glad that Googleguy could help you out, CY, and that maybe your site is on the road to recovery.

Thanks for that Jane, I hope so too.

Cy

[Jane_Doe]

CY - Your search example went to an interior page of your site that doesn't have a noindex tag. You can have noindex tags on some pages and not others, so some pages of your site may be indexed while other pages are not. I don't think the home page of your site is in the current Google index. I could not come up with any search terms that would bring up your home page in the Google search results.

[CromeYellow]

I see what you mean Jane. Googlebot must have come in via a link to a different page and ignored the index page because of the tags. That would explain the lower index page PR this crawl - it dropped from 3 to 2. It still doesn't explain the original problem, but we'll see what happens next index (or the one after that!) Thanks again.

[GoogleGuy]

I would take the meta tags off and wait to see how things look after the next crawl and index (not just the next index, because we may have crawled your site when your meta tags said "stay out, Google!").

[CromeYellow]

Thanks Googleguy. The tags are off and I'm sitting tight. (Waiting for lift off - hopefully :) )