I'm Infected With "Grey Bar Syndrome" !

Known Causes & Likely Cures?

[austtr]

When checking why a customer site has dropped off the radar in this last update, I see their Page Rank Bar is greyed out. I understand that to mean that the site has has not been banned, but has infringed one of Google's guidelines/filters and has been stripped of any PR value.

As my customers commercial returns are closely tied to their websites being available at all times, I am particularly sensitive to playing by the book with designs and submissions.... my wife says that by comparison, goody two shoes pales into insignificance.

So it's come as a surprise to find Google has a problem with one of these squeeky clean, ultra conservative efforts.... and I now realize I have no idea where to start looking for the offending bit. I'm hoping some of you may be able to provide pointers to the most common reasons why sites suffer from "grey bar syndrome".

To narrow the focus somewhat, I can advise that:

Mirror sites- No
Gateways - No
Cloaking - No
Link farms - No
Spamming Of Meta Tags - No
Keyword stuffing - No
Appears In ODP (& Google) Directory = Yes
Appears In Yahoo Directory - Yes
Outbound links - yes
Inbound links - yes

The site in question is in my profile. All contributions appreciated.

[oilman]

I see a PR4.

[deejay]

I understand that to mean that the site has has not been banned, but has infringed one of Google's guidelines/filters and has been stripped of any PR value.

Not as I understand it.

If a penalty has been applied for misbehaviour, the site will show an all WHITE toolbar = PR zero.

A grey toolbar indicates that Google hasn't calculated PR for that page, or has no inbound links to it (that Google knows about.

<edit> "or has very few/low value links" - scratch this - was thinking of another scenario where a site does actually have a white bar with no penalty - only has one very low PR inwards link.</edit>

If it has only few inbound links, it is possible that the linking sites were inaccessible by Google during the last crawl, and Google therefore has dropped the PR accordingly.

[edited by: deejay at 11:43 pm (utc) on Oct. 2, 2002]

[mosley700]

That word, PR0, don't mention it. Gives me the willies.

[cminblues]

The greyed bar often is a penalty.

cminblues

[Jane_Doe]

I also saw a PR4 on the home page of the site in your profile. I've noticed that sometimes the toolbar gives a little buggy results, fluctuating between a gray bar and the real PR for some pages. If you see a gray bar on a site that used to be a higher PR, it pays to reload the page a few times, as sometimes the PR will change.

[cminblues]

I also see a PR4 on your site.

cminblues

[whizkid]

I posted my own PR0 theory on a post named "Solving Current Page not Ranked Mystery". I would appreciate anyone contributing to that discussion. (It is very hard to find examples to analyse, but I'm sick and tired of divagation and gossips.)

I know for sure that lack of inbound links does not give a PR0. I have seen the examples myself. I think that too few outbound links might award a PR 0. (I saw a site passing from PR5 to not ranked in the last crawling, with an inbound PR6 link, and 8 more inbound links. It was a frame.)
I will check a gray PR for the first time now.
I know that a Current Page not Ranked page can exist in the index, and with one incoming link from a site like ODP.

I have also seen PR0/10, and it is different from not ranked.
I'm not sure if PR0 is a penalty. I have seen it in super (root) directories of some sites where there are pages with PR, (and extremely little possiblility someone has spammed intentionally).

Comments? (Help me find real PR0 and not ranked examples. Just tell me the keywords and #of result I have to check.)

[austtr]

I am also now seeing a PR4... trust me, it was solid grey when I looked 24 hours ago.

Now I'm even more confused... how does a site, in a mildly competitive search (200,000 results), with an average PR and reasonable content, go from page 2 to page 30?

There has to be some trigger to blow a site into obscurity... can anyone see what *&%^$#&**&^& it is? Where should I be looking?

Or maybe do nothing until the next update and see if it resurfaces?

[bigsefreak]

The greyed bar often is a penalty.

I am not sure if that is true. At least I hope it is not true.

My web site got hit by PR0 penalty (for some reason, that only google knows) and after writing few emails to google and waiting for about 10 months, I finally got a reply saying that during google update, the server might be down ........ blah blah blah.....

after few days of these email the recent google update occurred and now I notice that instead of having a *full white* PR, it is all grey for most pages and white for couple pages. So I am just hoping that they got some sense into their head and took of the penalty - else the way google is headed with their nonsense banning policies, they are not going to last long.

[cminblues]

I think that in your case the greyed bar is not a penalty, is a symptom of re-indexing sites. :)

cminblues

[JonnyWales]

austtr,

I'm in a very similar position. The site in question is also one which doesn't infringe anything that I know of but has disappeared from the radar for its main keyword. In addition the PR has also increased from 4 to 5? The site is returned for other search terms but not at all for the main one.

All I can think is that it has been caught by some sort of filter eg. some sort of density/page size/links criteria.

It would be almost more straightforward to have PR0, at least then I would know I had done somethng wrong .... only joking GG :)

Jonny

[SlyOldDog]

When a site used to have pagerank, but now has the grey bar, this is a penalty. It means you are gone and will never come back.

One word of caution. check your site without the www to make sure you are not ranked for this. This happened to me. I forgot to put the www in the url when submitting to yahoo.

[JonB]

what slyolddog saidf. one of my pages had grey pr without www and pr 6 with www.

bUT few days ago i was checking some siteand it was grey! i reloaded like few times and pr appeared. buggy toolbar could be the reason.:)

[ann]

My cure for the buggy toolbar was to delete it and then reload a brand new copy. Some of the files in it may have been corrupted in some manner.

Ann

[glengara]

Austtr, what does the directory toolbar show?