Recovering from PR0

Can a site recover naturally?

[fom2001uk]

One of our sites got the dreaded PR0 a few months ago and now we're about to re-launch it (same domain but re-designed). I'm 100% sure the PR0 was due to a ridiculously slow loading homepage, and several time-outs when Googlebot came round.

That's all changed now with the re-design but should we let Googlebot find it naturally (the site has a generous volume of inbound links) and wait to see the PR pick up again, or do we have to do something first, like contact Google (yeah right !) ?

[Tor]

Leave it alone and let Googlebot find it naturally. Good luck! ;)

[fom2001uk]

My inclination is to let Googlebot find it. But how long is that likely to take ?

[rogerd]

Google doesn't zap slow-loading sites with a PR0 penalty. If anything, the pages would simply be dropped if they couldn't be loaded. If your site is well-linked from other web sites listed in Google, you shouldn't have to do anything. Just keep your server up, and wait for Googlebot. There is an update once a month. Spidering occurs throughout the month, although there is usually a period of particularly intense crawling.

[fom2001uk]

"Google doesn't zap slow-loading sites with a PR0 penalty"

Maybe it should, though LOL

[Brett_Tabke]

Agreed Roger, but I don't think we can say for certain if download speed is factored into the algo some way. Remember a few years ago when an engineer from(?) said that dl speed was factored in? (I can't recall whether it was Ink, Alta, or NorthernLight that said that).

[thejenn]

I'd say an important question is this...

Have you every figured out what caused you to receive the PR0? Are you certain that you aren't still doing whatever caused it? Although possible, I think it's highly unlikely that a slow-loading page was the primary cause of the penalty.

I'd just hate to see you go through the work of an upgrade to your site, and the patience of waiting to be indexed again, only to be right back where you started.

I'm just suggesting that you carefully look the site over to make sure you don't still have anything "questionable" going on.

[fom2001uk]

If by "questionable", you're referring to cowboy SEO tactics, then the answer is NO, the site had nothing like that.

It was just poorly designed and often timed out when you visited it (huge database was slowing down the server). It also used a stupid FRAMES navigation from the homepage which prevented spiders following any links.

That's all changed now, and I'm putting a link to a spiderable sitemap from the homepage, just to make it extra easy for Googlebot :-)

[rudy]

If you go to google's webmasters area it has the answer for you.
I believe it is under an FAQ of Why did my site not get listed?
and one of the anwers is: If you site was unreacheable during the crawl. I would think all servers have some down time so a ban on non reachable servers would be very bad for Google.

[fom2001uk]

I think they must operate a "3 strikes and you're out" policy or something similar. Our particular site was down often, so I'm sure that's what got it the chop.