Back from PR0 by blocking bot.

Crosslinked -> Banned -> Blocked the Bot -> Full Recovery!

[Beachboy]

I thought I'd pass out a bit of new info on a pair of websites that have recovered from the dreaded PR0 disease they acqired last December.

Like many others here, I had crosslinked these sites (to excess, in Google's opinion), and they were duly penalized. A few months passed with no recovery, even after the crosslinking was removed.

Next step: I put up a robots.txt blocking Ms. Googlebot from these sites. (Only Googlebot was blocked. These sites have continued to enjoy nice positioning elsewhere.) I let this go for two months, then a month ago, I removed the robots.txt.

Today, I discovered both sites are back in the Google index, with PR5 on the homepage, PR4 on the inside.

That's interesting in its own right, but check this out. I have some other sites which were also caught up in this penalty. I never blocked Googlebot from them. Even though they enjoy better inbound linking than the two recovered sites, they have only PR3 on the homepage, PR0 on the sub pages.

Lesson? It could well be beneficial to drop out of the index for a month or two using robots.txt. It would appear the recovery would be far stronger upon your return. Me be a happy Beachboy! :)

[Ready To Roll]

That's a great maintennance strategy. If you have 12 sites, block the least popular one each month. In the long haul, you'd always be sure to have sites in the index. I think I'll employ this strategy once I have at least 12 sites to maintain.
R2R

[paynt]

Farmers leave a field fallow every few years to balance nature. Or is this more a case of shaking out the cobwebs?

[Beachboy]

I wonder whether the laws of nature even apply to search engines. You can believe the not-yet-fully-recovered sites I noted above are going to be yanked from Google for a month or two. I was very surprised to see the two test sites come back with such strength, now all I have to do is build more inbound links to better position them. Without crosslinking. ;)