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It's possible that this particular page was in some state of flux when Google spidered. However, it's a page that has a quick blurb about SEO, and that's what makes me wonder if I did a boo-boo by daring to mention the terms seo, sem, etc.
I am noticing much, much less traffic than usual (although I did discover that a new PR8 page is linking to me).
Two of my sites dropped by 1 page rank. Another retained the same page rank, and jumped from #78 to #36 out of 2.3 million results. So, this result was a mixed bag for me. Thoughts?
PageRank is per-page, but bans can be per-site. Sometimes, we get sloppy with semantics, though.
Anyone else have some wisdom to share w/lioness?" <bump>
Jim
If you have a page that is "risky" with words like "c l o a k i n g" and "SE O", and you suspect that they might get you in trouble, remember that Google adheres to the robot exclusion standard. If you add this page to your robots.txt file, then Google won't crawl it at all. Of course, they won't list it in search results either, so it's a double-edged sword.
You may have to be more specific with your terminology and your question... For example, meta keywords are pretty much ignored these days, and keywords-in-text would start to look pretty bad to a reader (and to the writer) well before any possible penalty might kick in. That's just MHO, but I've seen many pages that repeat themselves repeat themselves that survived.
Google has a list of do's and don'ts on their Webmaster help page. If it says "don't", then don't!
Optimism - Informed optimism - will serve you well. Check out the Google Webmaster help page, and read around here on WebmasterWorld for all the "My page got banned/PR0/dropped/disappeared" threads for more perspective.
Jim
1) The page has a noindex, nofollow tag.
2) The page was named "themeindex".
3) The page is a new page that didn't make it into the last index.
4) The page had doorway pages pointing to it.
You ask if it was the fact that you link to Google. Can anyone tell me if this is some sort of big no-no? I wonder because I would like to link to Google from some pages but if it's gonna cost me, I won't.
1. The page does not have a no index, no follow tag
2. The page is not named theme index
3. I thought this might be a possibility, but I uploaded 2 new pages over the course of 2 weeks, and the 2nd page I loaded made it into Google, but the first one got the greybar. Unless, the 2nd page got an automatic page rank, and the 1st page was actually crawled by Google. This means, I might see additional grey bars over the next update. Hmmmmm.....
4. I don't use doorways.
The ironic part is that anywhere on my sight where I use the words 'spamming', 'cloaking', etc (and I don't use them too often), it's always in the context of "don't do it!". I could imagine the Google algorithm automatically banning any pages that mentioned this (censorship; how un-american!), but that defies common sense for those who seek to advise others to avoid such tactics.
I could use a robot.txt file on this page. This page doesn't bring in a lot of traffic. Another page I have which has some easy-peasy Google Tool Bar 101 information on it draws the most traffic (or, at least, did until this last update).
I did check out the Google do's and don'ts. I can't find the particular page right this instant, but I came across something about not using Google search results on your web page. I wanted to revisit it to make sure that a link from my site to google.com was allowable.
[edited by: kfander at 3:21 am (utc) on Nov. 8, 2002]
I don't remember the "don't include search results on your page" warning, but seriously doubt that it means "Don't link to us." I believe you might them fairly mad if you popped Google Search into an iframe on your page, or if you scripted up a way to serve Google search results while removing their name and branding. But a link is certainly not theft of services!
In almost all cases where a page or site has a problem, the Webmaster knows what it is - at least after reading the Google Webmaster FAQ and spending some time here seraching in the Google knowledge base. He/she may be in denial, but knows what the problem is. I think you've just got a case of new-page everflux or one of those minor inexplicables that vanishes after a solid spidering cycle and update.
Hang in there!
Jim
It will be interesting to watch the next update and to see if any of the other additional pages I uploaded also get the dreaded grey bar. I don't see anything I did wrong that's glaringly obvious, and no mischief was intended. So, I will take a wait and see approach. It just might be that these informational Google pages of mine will have to be no index, no follow'd.
Thanks,
W
themeindex.htm specifically is bad. This is the filename generated by one of those automatic links-page-generator tools - Zeus Webster Pro, IIRC - that goes out and scans for links related to your site's theme and builds a links page for you. There are thousands of these pages - many of them complete duplicates - cluttering up the search results. So search engines don't like them much.
Jim
W
Is your page back in the index? I had a single page with a grey bar after the last update that's back in with PR5 ;)
I had 45 minutes of sporadic outages on my site last week, so it will be interesting to see if I receive any grey bars from it.
Thanks for asking!
