How can I recover from a penalty?

Combined PR0 threads.

[tristan]

Hi,
I own a rather small specialized directory/search engine which was doing quite OK in Google in the last months (had a PR5 last month), but it looks that the whole site (mainpage and all subpages) have been PR0'd this update...
This is obviously a penalization (last month I had +160 backlinks, and they're still there)
The only reason I can come up with is that I must have linked to a bad neighbourhood or something like that...
Some weeks ago I posted here asking how you could distinguish between a PR0 as in low PR count, and a PR0 as in a penalized site, and the answers I got was I should analyse the site etc.
Unfortunately, since I'm running a directory/search engine this is almost an impossible task to do that for every submission I get, so I decided to list everything that was usefull for my surfers... guess I was wrong... :¦

I've been busy now changing all direct links with links through a cgi-script, and blocking that one with a robots.txt, but I've already tried that one in the past with no success (google still saw them as backlinks, link format was href="/cgi-bin/link.pl?http://www.google.com/")

Is there anybody who knows how long a PR0 penalization lasts, and if you can contact Google so they can un-penalize my site so it can be back in the game next update?

Thanks!

[fathom]

Why has that one not been penalized?

Not on Google's radar as yet, or no one has reported it as spam, or was reported as spam and Google has determined that it's not, or has been reported but Google hasn't gotten around to it yet, or...

When it comes right down to it... could be a few hundred reasons.

[jayq]

I don't think the all white toolbar is "penelty" - I think it's just low pagerank - Google seems to have picked up it's standards as to what is a good link.

[maimax]

Dear All

Now, google already banned my website and pagerank is ZERO. The most important I couldn't find my website in Google's database.

The casue came from I used link exchange services.

Plese help me How I can solve out this problem.

Best regards
maimax

[JBoss008]

If you are linking in a "Bad Neighborhood" get rid of those linking programs or exchange services.

Take a look at their PR and if they are PR 0 also get your site out of there.

Look around the net and do some linking yourself and you will have much better success.

[rfgdxm1]

Since he stated he used a link exchange service, probably best to throw away the old domain name and start over.

[yankee]

I'd throw away the domain too. When I first started a few years ago I joined LinkTopics. I had no idea what a link farm was, but I got PR 0. And now two years later, despite dropping the links to that link farm OVER A YEAR AGO, it's still PR 0 despite some quality links into my site.

[rfgdxm1]

Google is merciless. So merciless in fact that it has me worried about the fact that I exchange links with a huge, highly authoratative site that is the dominant site on the topic my 2 sites are about. The problem is this site exhanges links with most of the other sites in the topic area worth mentioning. What if one of those sites they link to turns out to be part of a link farm? With all the sites worth mentioning exchanging links with this one huge site, Google could consider the lot of us a bad neighborhood and throw us ALL out. Google can instill so much paranoia that I seriously am considering dropping the links with all the quite respectable sites I do, and just try and get by with my DMOZ listing for both domains, and a Yahoo! directory for one of these 2. Perhaps we should coin a new word for what webmasters feel about Google: Googlenoia. ;)

[john316]

maimax

Don't junk your current domain.

Buy a new domain.

Copy your existing content to a new server/domain, change the content/structure a bit.

Ban googlebot from the old domain, but keep it live (there are other engines on the horizon who will probably like it).

This way you get the benefit of traffic from the old domain via other engines and don't incur a duplicate penalty from google.

[rfgdxm1]

Why not ban Googlebot from the old domain, and redirect that to the new one?

[emione]

Hi John316,

I'm in somewhat of the same situation. I plan on getting a new domain, moving to a new server and changing the site and site structure, but you mention keeping the current domain and not allowing Googlebot to the old domain.

How would you ban Googlegot from the old domain, while also using a new domain?

Thanks.

[jayq]

I had a site banners by Google (the dreaded grey bar!) and I had to make another copy of it, put it on another domain, and it went staight up to PR4 right out of the gate in this index.

Just put the site on a new domain, is my suggestion.

[WebGuerrilla]

You ban Googl from the old (penalized) domain by excluding it using a robots.txt file. The reason you don't redirect the site is that you don't want to tell Google where you have moved the site that they have penalized.

Once a couple of months have passed, you can remove the the robots.txt file from the old site and see if it gets deep crawled. 9 times out of 10 it will. If the original site returns in the SERPS, then you can exclude the new site.

[Brett_Tabke]

We've got several of these threads on the subject running:

Continued over here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[jayq]

I have some sites up that have (what people are calling) PR0 on the index page but show ranking on inside pages. I thought if you had PR0 it would be on your whole site. Anybody seen this before? Maybe this means an all white bar is not penelty - just bad ranking.

[JonB]

i jsut saw this today too!my site was pr 0 for 1 year. but on further inspection here is my idea: thosep ages that have pr bigger than pr 0 are the pages that are NOT in the google index! my site has pr 1 on index, pr 3 on one page whcih never lost ranking and all other pages pr 0.FEW pages have pr 2(!?) and those pages are not in the index. or at least i could not find them yet.

[jayq]

Anyone had experience with getting your pr0 pages up while other pages on the same domain are still listed without having to get you site excluded from the index?

[OldFatherTime]

Is a PR0 or a grayed out rank indicator the sign of a Google ban?

My site has been PRgray ever since I started looking at the toolbar. It's in DMOZ, AV, MSN etc. Has quality on topic links from other sites. A few weeks ago the site would suddenly appear in the Google index for about 2 days (with a date next to the URL) and just as quickly disappear again.

Then, just before the last crawl started - there I was - in the index for over a week and no date next to the listing; but still a grayed out pagerank and, of course no backlinks.

Now the crawl's finished and I'm scratched from the index again. The HTML, CSS and robots.txt all validate 100%. The google bot comes in quite regularly but all it does is grab robots.txt, home page and no more - ever. Other bots are happy to crawl the entire site.

So I guess I must be banned for some reason or other. What do you think?

[rfgdxm1]

Did you perhaps buy a used domain name with a shady past that got the Google Death Penalty?

[ann]

It's pretty hard to answer a question like that without seeing your site....if you list it in your profile someone may be able to help.

Ann

[Tor]

Is a PR0 or a grayed out rank indicator the sign of a Google ban?

A PR0 is normally a sign of a Google ban. A greyed out rank indicator does not mean that the site is banned.

[nutsandbolts]

PageRank Zero

If your site is brand new you may of just received a minor "skim" by the Googlebot for this update - Don't panic! Build content and get lots of quality (themed if you can) links and you should be fine in the next update. This isn't a penalty. Enjoy the 0/10 for the month. It's the new black.

Or, if you've been naughty by cross-linking or joining a link farm (moooo!) then you have probably received the dreaded and much feared 0 Pagerank Penalty. These can last anything from 1 update to the end of time. Some expire, some don't. It all depends on how naughty you've been.

Greyed Out Pagerank

Possibly a brand new site that hasn't been indexed by Google yet. Get quality (themed) links and wait until the next update.

Or it could also be a total ninja ban from Google for breaking their TOS (such as the Webposition Gold Web site)...you would be very lucky to get this back.

Always be careful when buying a second-hand domain. You may be inheriting all the bad karma from the previous owner!

Your actions determine which one you receive - most of the time it isn't a penalty. Sometimes you drop from the index, sometimes you lose rank. It's part of the wibbly wobbly fun of being in Google! Really, you have to be a complete and utter idiot like myself to get a real 100% All American(tm) 0 Penalty Pagerank!....

[OldFatherTime]

The site "h......co.za" as listed in my profile is about 2 years old. Not (to the best of my knowledge) member of any link farms - if I search specifically for my business Google returns all the linking sites that I know I'm in - normal quality travel related sites with their own good PRs.

The domain is not used - but it does reside on a virtual server. Is the potential problem with a virtual server that another site on the same server is behaving 'badly'?

I am aware of one potential problem site that gets returned in my search for my business name. It has a large amount of white text on a (you guessed it) white background. The text contains the name of practically every single guest house in South Africa. However, if you follow Google to this link - it gets a PR6. Should I try and pull my name from this site?

Thankx for all the suggestions,
Chris

[jayq]

Ok, I see a lot of posts about the dreaded PR0. It's my understanding that if the bar is solid white - you are PR0 and, if you are full gray - you are not indexed or banned.

I tend not to think that the all white is a penelty, just really low page rank. I have noticed (as I'm sure a few of you have) that by adding or subtracting the www. you can show 2 different page ranks. By the same logic, that would mean that the lower page of the two (with or without the www.) would be in penelty. I don't think that is the case. So who out there thinks or knows for sure if the all white bar is really a "penelty"? I would love to hear from you on this.

Which brings us to another good question: is google counting the [mydomain.com...] different from [mydomain.com?...] Google is pretty smart, it would seem to me that they would know better.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

[giveawayrooms]

being fairly new to this, I didn't realise that you could have 2 different page ranks - with or without the www

So I tried it on my site - home page PR5 - but without the www it is greyed out

Now I'm scared!

Can someone answer jayq's question and put my mind at rest too!

[rfgdxm1]

>Which brings us to another good question: is google counting the [mydomain.com...] different from [mydomain.com?...] Google is pretty smart, it would seem to me that they would know better.

Because [mydomain.com...] and [mydomain.com...] are NOT the same. That www IS a true subdomain. I could easily configure my websites to serve up one page with [mydomain.com,...] and a different one with [mydomain.com....] I've actually seen cases where webmasters DID in fact do this. By common custom people resolve the www subdomain to root. However, there is no reason this has to be.

[mellonhead]

Would it also follow that www1 and www2 are both treated as subdomains?

We've had a bit of software doing our load balancing, with no url masking - hence having www1, www2 etc etc and it appears to split our PR.

On the google directory we have a 6, and yet both of the www1 and www2 are less (2/3)

I've now resorted to a url masking load balancer to hopefully sort things out.

Just thought it might be similar to the domain.com versus www.domain.com.

[Yidaki]

mellonhead, you're right. All that comes before the domain.com is called third level domain, or sub domain. So ftp.domain.com, www.domain.com, www1.domain.com are treated as different hosts. You *could* set up different content under each of them. However google only crawls them if they are linked from elsewhere or if you load balance redirect from the www.domain.com to www1, www2 or whatever without masking.

[xbase234]

referring to a post early in this thread -

Would hosting DMOZ directory listings be banned due to duplicate content, or by the nature that it is duplicate content *from DMOZ*?

I was fortunate enough to see the problem with my PR0 site, was able to correct, and got it reinstated in 10 weeks. It's a bit more difficult when you don't know why -

[mtgratedir]

In this update I had a bunch of sites go from PR 5 to all gray bar. As of today I had 3 more sites drop to the gray bar, all 3 had PR 4 or 5. Not page rank 0 but gray bar. I believe the gray bar means they dropped the site and you are banned. With PR0 so you can still search and find your site in the index. Why they were dropped is very hard to figure out. Also haveing 3 more grayed out today is scary. I am thinking the toolbar may be the problem. I never had any problems until I installed the toolbar. Google probably realizes that only seo poeple will use the toolbar. Any thoughts?

[cayleyv]

I have a penalty on my site as well. I offer webdesign and search engine marketing services, and 2 days ago google dropped my homepage by 2 to a 4 and slashed ALL interior pages to PR 0

Is this fair just because i do marketing and have clients listed on my site?