Cool - I've been Google Bowled

Natural linking causing grey bar?

[vordmeister]

I'm quite excited. I put an information / tutorial site up on the net (January 05) about a technique /skill where there previously were no free information sites. I searched for the informationm for a friend and couldn't find it - so I put it up on the net.

I did no promotion other than mention it on two related sites of mine.

Immediately I started getting loads of e-mails of the "really useful stuff" variety. Loads of people linked from related forums. I got some great positions in Yahoo and MSN almost immediately.

Then a blog on the subject put a post up to the effect "people keep asking me this stuff - find it here" (on my site). But for some reason they sitewide linked my new site.

Today the main site is grey bar (although the forum subdirectory is still PR4).

Maybe it's a glitch, and I can't understand why a sub-directory would still have PR. But I'm thinking a possible penalty.

It's funny - this is the only site of mine I can truely say is white hat. Normally they go a little grey hat after a while.

So what do you think - have I been Google Bowled by natural linking?

[Vadim]

Disclaimer: only Google knows how it works.

Well, if you read all Google guidelines on their site and are sure that you follow them, just wait a couple of month.

Google seems "filters" sites that gain the popularity too fast, I mean much faster than other similar sites.

As far as I know, it is temporary. You should come back.

Vadim

[vordmeister]

Thanks Vadim.

I was rash in posting. I've never had any grey bar before so was a little concerned.

Pagerank returned after 3 days, so I'm guessing either the server or google was suffering a glitch.

Certainly no evidence for googlebowling.

[ilikeyou]

There was a 2 or three day period where all websites were gray barred. Did you check other domains too?

Sometimes sites just get gray barred for a while for no reason.

Then some times some sites may have a page rank of 4 in reality, but who only show a page rank of 2 on the bar for several days. It's almost not worth even worrying about it - unpredictable.