Greybarring

A buddies site has been greybarred, why?

[mipapage]

Hey All,

For the last couple of PR updates, a friends website, that I host, has seen it's homepage (formerly PR8) greybarred.

It's PR usually returns sometime (a couple of weeks) after the PR update - I'm not sure how or why this happens, but the PR 'returns' (at 7) a little later, seemingly not during a PR update.

The thing that gets me is this site is an authority website in the realm of web design with 353 backlinks, mostly organic and from a lot of PR7-8 websites.

There is nothing fishy going on, though the site does show up in Google for both www.mysite.com and mysite.com, and it uses a css image replacement technique [google.com] on it's home page.

Another weird thing is that the site lost it's directory listing earlier this year - this seemed to coincide with the PR problem. The category for the directory, in both Dmoz and Google, show 59 sites next to the cat title, yet in the G directory listings only 7 sites are listed!?

The site is built as a set of tutorials for the user - there is 0 SEO going on, and when I reveiwed the site I could see nothing funky being done. As it is now greybarred it rarely gets freshed.

So:

• Any ideas what may be happening?
  
• Are there others out there with the same dilemma?
  
• What are G's reasons for greybarring these days?
  

[Solution1]

I wouldn't be surprised if the image replacement is seen by Google as hidden text - and is penalized.

[mipapage]

I've often wondered that myself, but look at the csszengarden, for example. It was one of the sites that really slingshotted the idea of image replacement, and there are no grey bars there.

In addition, many people use techniques similar to I.R. to hide accessibility links, without repercussion, so I'm not totally convinved that I.R. would be the reason.

[mipapage]

*Ahem* monday bump!

[mipapage]

Okay, realized today that the site author writes for some e-zines, and after his articles have been up long enough on the 'zines they allow him to move them over to his site... Duplicate content penalty?

Now, some of the articles have been up on his site for nearly a year and they are white-barred.

I'll search around here for some duplicate content penalties, but if anyone has any advice, feel free to step up!