Out for the count?

or just in the penalty box.

[jaeden]

When a site get's busted and grey barred for having hidden links on their front page, how long is that penalty. The offending sites have already fixed their hidden links over the weekend. Should they be expected to be right back where they were by the next update, or does the penalty hold for longer than that?

[tigger]

It can take a few updates if ever! I had a site lost all PR I cleaned it up removing anything that could be seen as spammy, even dropped Google an email telling what had been removed, that was 4 mths ago the site is still showing a zero PR

Don't hold your breath :(

[makemetop]

>busted and grey barred..

If you are really grey barred as a ban, a human put on the penalty. You have to ask Google really nicely to get them to lift the ban - otherwise you won't get crawled. It can take a long time - about 2 months from the ban being lifted (and that can take a while - if ever) to seeing yourself re-appear.

Hidden links, eh? As tigger said - don't hold your breath!

[edited by: makemetop at 4:43 pm (utc) on Jan. 6, 2003]

[creative craig]

Slightly off topic one of my sites had a PR5 before update now has a PR1, all internal PR has dropped as well from a 3 or 4 to a 1 :(

Oh well...

Craig

[jaeden]

tigger,

Did they give you a reason as to why you were banned? Do you know for sure why you were banned (were you spamming) or did you just suspect you were doing something wrong?

[tigger]

>why you were banned

Nope dropped from a PR6 to Zero, after many nights of trying to work out what I'd done wrong I decided it was down to linking to another site (both sites dropped from PR6 to zero)

Site A- blue widgets with pages on different sizes, site B Red widgets both sites linked up, the sites had no spammy tricks, hidden text, cloaked pages or offensive colours Yes I thought of that too :)

After 5 emails to Google, with no replies I dumped the URL’s and started again, after this update I’m back to a PR5 with 2 new sites – Not linked

[jaeden]

So you think you got busted because you were linking to two different sites that were "offensive". That kinda sucks for those people that are creating reciprocal link pages and such. So if a site in a directory goes bad, that may just trickle up the line? Were those links on your front page or buried in your site?

[tigger]

The linking was part of the navigation, blue widgets, red widgets, but it was a good exchange and if google had looked at the sites it would have seen it was done just to offer a different product. Linking from a single page would not cause a problem

Although I still don’t know for sure that this was the problem as I never got any reply to my emails

[jaeden]

Well I honestly feel sorry for those that get banned and don't know why, but for those that get banned because of obvious black & white spam, then ... "you play with matches".

[Dante_Maure]

GoogleGuy's advice on emailing about penalized sites that have been cleaned up. [webmasterworld.com]