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I think it got penalized because I signed too many guest books. I know it's common belief that Google does not do that now, but maybe it did back then.
What do you think?
My Google toolbar is white and the site in Google's Directory [directory.google.com ] (it's at the bottom) shows no page rank.
Maybe this is my lucky update since the server you're using is showing a PR.
I emailed Google a while ago and asked why my site doesn't come up at all when I searched for "My Site". Their answer was to give the index page a PR1. The rest of site would stay at zero. Even pages with good incoming links. Last month I don't think I saw even the PR1.
When I asked Google if my site was penalized, they too would see a PR1 and say it wasn't. Believe me it is. A page with a number of links that index page has would be more than a PR1.
I see PR0 & PR1 (fluctuates as expected) which generally means a penalty of some type when according to ATW you have close to 600 backlinks.
Did this happen in August 2001 or August 2002? If in 2002 you might have been hit by a crosslinking penalty. July/August 2002 was the first time I noticed that penalty applied in an attempt to stop link farms.
I don't believe Google has a penalty for GB's. It would be too easy for competitors to kill sites. I have a few GB links, they don't seem to do any harm.
That was nice of them :)
I've found it a site picks something up rather than spend weeks/months trying to get it back in you are far better just starting again with another URL, pain yes but it's better than constantly waiting for a penalty to get lifted
I signed too many guest books
If Google ignores the guest book links, then how many links with a reasonable PR are left over?
Having a lot of pages indexed results in the spread of the inbound PR.
Very few. 8 links on Google and the hundreds of alltheweb links are nearly all internal or duplicates, hence they don't show up on Google because of the low PR.
If you have a PR of 1 you aren't banned, so the solution is to go and get a whole bunch of good quality links and the PR will rise.
PR0 or PR1
I don't think Google penalizes for GBs now. But imagine back in the summer of 2001. The site in my profile was about six months old and recently put in ODP and given some page rank. I read Brett's suggestion, at the time, to use guest book entries to increase PR. I did a search in Google for "'guestbook' keyword", and signed many GBs. The next update my page rank went up and my traffic from Google more than doubled. That was great. For a few days. Then the PR0.
Before I post this I look and see that there are a lot of responses to my question. Sorry, I can't keep up. I'm going to start sending without using spell checker. This is in response to Tigger. I'll respond to others after this is posted.
Thanks.
Really?
I see sites in that guestbook before and after MotherE's July 2001 date that have PR4's and PR5's.
tigger,
I've been working on other things. I've just let the site in profile be. It's pretty easy maintenance.
takagi and Receptional Andy,
Do a search in Google for allintext: "domaininprofile.com" -site:domaininprofile.com
Those are links to domain in my profile with the url in link. This doesn't count links that don't have url.
www.google.com/search?as_q=&num=100&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=example.com&as_oq=&
as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=body&as_dt=e&as_sitesearch=example.com&safe=images
shaadi,
Maybe that's it.
[edited by: ciml at 10:28 am (utc) on May 16, 2003]
[edit reason] Scrolling fixed and switched to example.com [/edit]
As well as the linking issues - maybe Google decided that your site is duplicate content?
I copied and pasted a single sentence from one of your pages into google (not that I needed to book a hotel in my home town)- and found two more webpages, on other sites which had the same content. One even had the same nav & layout and style.
I suspect that these other 2 sites are also yours - and they linked to other keyword1-keyword2 domains with your business name on them (but not in the URL)?
I'd be looking at the dup content angle - and the interlinking (as previously mentioned) for the answers...
Chris_D
The eight links showing on www-sj are not on www (they weren't last night anyway). So there maybe a liitle hope for me this update.
The way Google penalizes PR is by ignoring links. I can find plenty of quality links to the index page, and to other pages, but not by using Google's link:http://urlinprofile.com/
The link to Google's search in my last post brings up some.
I would list others here that don't have the url in link but I'm pretty sure it's against the rules.
I tried this too after reading your post and found 332 pages containing the exact 10 word sentence I searched for from one of the pages (only 30 of which Google deemed worthy of actually showing me). This appears to be a fairly extensive dupe content problem, combined with a lack of quality links and a large number of low quality links (the allintext search you gave returned many low PR and guestbook pages which Google will at best ignore).
[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 10:35 am (utc) on May 16, 2003]
To say the least. I can't believe Google could be this stupid, although perhaps I am over optimistic. This would be stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Not only competitors, but just people who didn't like the site owner could blow the site out of Google. Plus, if Google could identify guestbook links, all they would need to do is add into the algo the rule "IF link is from a guestbook THEN ignore." This would thwart webmasters trying to boost their PR, while simultaneously making it impossible to hose the competition by signing guestbooks.
Someone suggested this to me yesterday. Maybe you are right. The country information is public domain from The World Factbook and the U.S. Department of State. I just now did a search for a couple of sentences from the site in profile and got 228 pages with the exact words. I didn't know that many were using the same stuff. Now I'm going to check their PR. I started at the top of the list and that page had a PR of 4. Number 60 down the list has a PR of 4. Mumber 101 down the list has a PR of 2. The page with the text from my domain does not come up in SERPs even though it is in their index.
Anyway, I can see that this could be a flag.
takagi,
You may be right. Thanks.
Thanks.
the practice of copying information even if it's public domain seems to me to be a challenge for google. Seeing a web page can be read by more than one person at a time and is available to all, why would a webmaster want to copy it, apart from beefing up their "content" for SE purposes. Why dont they just link to the original.
Th CIA fact book has been a favourite of webmasters who want an easy way to lots of keyword rich authoritative content for years. In fact its so popular, you can be absolutely assured that thousadns of webmasters have thought of it before - and lots of other "public domain" material as well..
Try any sentence from the World Fact Book and you will see lots of sites come up. Thankfully Google is on to it and we get less sites these days..
You said, "Thankfully Google is on to it and we get less sites these days."
The CIA World Fact Book is a great source. A site that "quotes" a sentence or paragraphs from it should not be penalized for doing so.
If a lot of sites link to a page that copies sections of the World Fact Book, they must think it is worthwhile. So it gets a high PR. That's how it should be.
Trying to understand a webmaster's motive isn't easy. A SEO may project their motives on to someone else. Maybe the whole page that would have been linked to is not relevant to the subject. A site about travel may not want all the CIA's facts about a country's military.
There are 238 pages with the text "The USSR was forced to withdraw 10 years later by anti-communist mujahidin forces supplied and trained by the US". The top page has a PR4. That site's homepage has a PR6. All these 238 pages still need to offer something the others don't to rank well.
We don't need another blanket penalty from Google.
It got PR0ed in August 2001.
So true.
>The CIA World Fact Book is a great source. A site that "quotes" a sentence or paragraphs from it should not be penalized for doing so.
Mischaracterization, misrepresentation, disengenuity, and specious logic all in two little sentences.
1) Why the quote marks around "quotes?" Admittedly, the best term for "copied from a single source without attribution" is "plagiarized" -- the term "quotation" should be reserved for repeating content with some indication that the content is not original. If I wrote something like "Copying one source is plagiarism, copying three is research," I'd quote it.
2) Nobody accused the site of copying "a sentence" -- someone, assuming [correctly, as it turned out] that yet another blasted cloaked hotel reservation affiliate site wouldn't bother to create any original content, tested for copying the whole section by searching for a single sentence.
3) There is no indication that the site has been penalized at all! Google has made the eminently sensible decision (from the standpoint of their users and customers) to NOT go through the effort and expense of indexing the site, for the very good reason that it evidently hasn't any content of interest that isn't already indexed on hundreds of other sites. That's not a penalty at all.
Google has not declined to provide the site with anything that was promised (either specifically or generally) or paid for. Google has always promised NOT to index all sites, and to try to return only the most relevant sites as defined by an algorithm. They are doing that. There's no penalty; if there were a penalty, it would have been richly deserved. There's no benefit; if there had been a benefit it would not have been deserved at all -- the site contributes nothing whatsoever to the sum of human knowledge or achievement! It is pure affiliate spam.
No.
Thanks for replying.
I disagree with everything you said.
I'm not going to talk about any specific site because ciml doesn't want me to.
Google is going "through the effort and expense of indexing [a] site" if it's been getting crawled every month for the past two years and has 2840 results in the SERPs doing a search for allinurl: "example.com" site:example.com. Whether you want to call it a penalty or ban or anything else doesn't matter. How can Google ignore hundreds of links without some expense?
A few school teachers also disagree with you. Maybe they did a search on FAST and found a page with copied sections from the CIA Fact Book that were so much easier to read than the CIA's site. They link to it from their school's website.
Let PR decide for Google what is a worthwhile site without interference from human editors.
toolbarqueries PR0
www2 PR1
www3 PR1
www-fi PR1
www-in PR0
www-va PR0
www-ex PR0
www-sj PR1
www-dc PR0
www-ab PR0
www-zu PR0
www-cw PR0
