Gray bar

[Good_Vibes]

My site went from a PR6 to a gray bar.
Can anyone shed some light as to what would cause this?

Just to clarify, this is not a spam site, there is no reason that this site would get banned.

As far as I understand it, this means that the site is no longer in the database. What could have caused it to fall out?

[takagi]

If the site is not penalized, but you got a gray bar;

- site down so bot cannot visit it
- moved to other hosting company (new IP address)
- problem with robots.txt (or META variant in homepage)
- duplicate content
- no inbound links anymore
- no new inbound links for previously expired site
- homepage missing/corrupted/no reading permission
- toolbar problem (check if every site has a gray bar)

[edited by: takagi at 4:06 pm (utc) on May 5, 2003]

[rogerd]

Server unavailability during crawl and database glitches seem to be the major causes of this.

[vnsampat]

Good_vibes, was the site in the Google Directory? If it was its best to check that its still there.

If its missing from the google dir. chances are they have dropped it. Its best you send google a mail for reinclusion. Even if the site finds its way back automatically in a few days, a reinclusion request would'nt hurt.

Juz my thoughts.

Vishal.

[iSeeker]

Takagi,

My site has also gone from the database. You have raised some good explanations. However, if it is due to our servers being down, wouldn't the problem show up after an update rather than before?

[takagi]

Hello iSeeker,

Is your site usually visited by freshbot with small intervals? Or to put it differently; does Google often add a date next to the the URL of the pages in your site? If so, then it is easier for Google to detect a site is down. And maybe it could (incorrectly) decide inbetween two updates that your site might be gone.

[Good_Vibes]

Well this is disturbing by Takagi:

- no inbound links anymore

Can anyone else confirm that Google drops sites if its inbound links get removed?

(it's not the case here because the site is in ODP, but nonetheless it is disturbing)

[takagi]

Hi Good_Vibes, sorry to disturb you. I will give you some explanation, since no one else replied to your request.

Think about the following situation:

Someone has a personal site of 3 pages on a free server (Geocities or so) and these 3 pages are linking to each other and there is 1 inbound link. After Google finds the inbound link, the 3-page site is indexed. A few months later, the inbound link is removed. So the 3 pages are an island in the big web called Internet. IMHO Google will eventually remove the 3 pages from the index, even though every individual page has 2 incoming links (from the other 2 pages in the site).

Sounds logic to you? And if so, does it matter if the site is a personal site? Or if it's on a free server? Or has 3 or 5 pages? Probably not. But the best way to find out, is just start a test as described above.

[trillianjedi]

Yes, very unlikely that a site will stay in the index if there's no inbound links.

TJ

[AthlonInside]

Ask yourself if you have any hidden links in your site before. If yes, that's for sure the answer.

Tips: If no inbound links, it usually means PR0 instead of grey bar.

[netnerd]

Is a grey bar a penalty or can it be a new site?

I have a number of sites who wish to exchange links , but some of them have grey bars.

Should i link to them?

[AthlonInside]

the new hidden links penalty will remove a site from the index and get a grey bar.

New site not in index also has grey bar. So you should examine to see if that site got the grey bar because of a penalty or if it is new.

[netnerd]

But how can i tell?

[AthlonInside]

If they just started to trade links, there would be a little bit of links. So the are new. If they still got grey bar with tons of links, close your browser! :)

You may also check their domain whois to see if the domain is new or old.

[netnerd]

Is it ok to change links with them anyway - they have other sites which are not penalised so i dont want to loose out on the opportunity for a large link swap.

Would i be penalised for linking to them?

[Sarah Atkinson]

OK what exsactly is this grey/white bar I have been hearing so much aboult?

[Good_Vibes]

Hi Sarah,

You can get info about white vs. grey here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

) As for my dilema, does anyone know if there is a way for me to tell if my site got banned, or if it was just a hic-up.

2) I heard something about checking the backlinks in Google, but it seems strange to me (if there are no backlinks, then it is a hic up). Can anyone confirm this?

[Sarah Atkinson]

OK all this talk aboult grey and white bar... WHAT BAR? what I want to know is what does this grey and white bar look like.
I get the part that both are bad but what bar are you guys talking aboult.. and what is good? NO bar?

[trillianjedi]

Sarah,

They're talking about the Google ToolBar (the tool you can download from google's website) and, specifically, the section on that toolbar (which installs itself into your browser) marked "PageRank" (the "bar").

"PageRank" is discussed quite a lot around here so I won't go into details, but if you search that term on here I suspect you'll get about 4 million results. Google's website has a good explanation of PageRank on it.

TJ

[Sarah Atkinson]

Well it definelty helps knowing aboult the Google toolbar to understand what all of you have been talking aboult. just downloaded it