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A couple of months ago, I created a site for a client. It's a nice site that's had a lot of positive comments and while building it I feel I was especially careful not to do anything that may cause Google's displeasure.
The site was launched in early January, after the deep crawl if I remember correctly. In the Jan update, the home page had a PR of 3 and internal pages were PR0. I thought this a bit odd, but considering the time of launch I believe that it was just a Google-ism and that the Jan/Feb full crawl would sort things out.
This update, the entire site is PR0 - definitely, even with the dance taken into account. I've been puzzling over this for a couple of days. I can't find anything obvious in the site that would cause this situation.
Then, I remembered...
The client (who is new to online business) took out an advertising campaign a week or two after the site was launched. It was only a few days and I didn't find out about it until after the event. The client had no idea that what he was doing may cause problems, his site was new and understandably he was eager to start creating traffic. He used what appeared to be a standard popunder network.
But it wasn't...
After investigating the situation, it turns out the network is involved with scumware and hijacking browsers. They use a portal to display advertiser home pages as the surfers' home page. The portal, needless to say, now has a Google penalty in place - and rightly so, scumware is a disgusting practice. Google hasn't caught up with the accomplice site as yet, but I'm sure they will in due course.
I'm 99.99% sure that my client was swept up in the Google penalty i.e. in a case of unfortunate timing, his home page was appearing on this portal at the time that Google was going through - there were many displays of it over those couple of days.
Has anyone else experienced a PR0 from this kind of thing before? It was an honest mistake on my clients' part and I'd like to assist him in getting his listing restored.
If I had known that he was planning this type of promotion for his new site, I would have strongly advised him against it - but he gave no indication. He learned very quickly first hand what the term "garbage traffic" means.
I've never had to approach Google directly before regarding a PR0 issue and I would appreciate any advice for this particular situation.
Thanks.
[edited by: icarus at 11:55 pm (utc) on Mar. 10, 2003]
Thanks for your response. Yes, I did look into this. The domain has been registered since 2000 but hasn't been used until this year.
I even checked the outgoing links on this site - not a single low PR site amongst them.
