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When we looked into why it ranked so high, we found that a large part of it came from my sig line in the phpBB forums. I am an uncurable phpBB addict, and support phpBB by buying mousepads, etc from the phpBB store and giving them away to members. I belong to several forums - and none of my membership in forums is intended to create pagerank. Indeed, by all rights phpBB should not be giving off PageRank insofar as it should not be indexable because of the session ID's in the URLs.
To penalize the site due to links in sig lines is to penalize forum membership. If Google looks on these links as SPAM, they should disregard them. In fact, since these links were not put on the pages by the owner of the phpBB, I feel that Google SHOULD disregard them. Most members of our forum put their website in thier sig line - and if Google PR Zero-ed all of these sites in sig lines, dmoz, yahoo, and even Google would be PR0.
My site should not have PR7 due to sig lines - neither should it have PR7 due to sig lines.
It should have PR7 due to the fact that it is listed in several directories including dmoz, JoeAnt, GoGuides, and others. Several members have placed links to the site on thier index pages, and the site has a good number of links from PR7 and PR6 pages. It earned PR7 w/o the forum sig links.
Now, GoogleGuy has said:
I know your site is clean--been there before. I'll investigate.
If it weren't for GoogleGuy noticing my post, I think my site would remain in PR0 hell forever - due to an undeseved penalty. I'm thinking that there should be more communication between Google and webmasters before penalties are handed out. "Before" is the keyword here.
is it good practice to leave your URL as a footer on discussion boards and guest books?
That's a classic way to generate traffic. I'll agree that it shouldn't be considered for PageRank, but it shouldn't be penalized either. And from what GoogleGuy's saying, I don't think it is.
The scenerio you describe could be understandable for a site that's only a month or so old. I have a 4-5 month old site in the same boat.
It could even apply to a year old site. I was specifically referring to GCN's case.
If you go and read the expired domain threads you might see how it applies to older sites too. I'm not claiming that it is the problem, but it is one thing that we definitely know has been applied to this update and can lead to a drop in PR.
Div
Do you know how many really good links you lined up before the first deep crawl? If you didn't have any that you know of, it was probably links in to the previous site at that domain.
I'm just doing some research and trying to understand how expired domains are being handled Google. A new twist to an already exciting and volatile online world!
Does anyone know of a way of seeing who the previous holders of a domain were?
Did you get those PR5/6 links before the February crawl? If not, you may have to wait till the March dance to see the results of those links.
Yes. The links were picked up during the early weeks of January as I was working towards getting the site indexed. Admittedly, I wasn't expecting to get into the February index but I did and ranked decently.
Everything I do is for the long term and would rather work my way up the SERPs over the course of time instead of tricking and spamming search engines. That doesn't make sense anyways because it's hard work running and maintaing site, why risk it all by being aggressive and short sighted.
Thanks!
GCN
