that strange redirect to the welcome.html___ page is your likely culprit. If you added that since the last update...or even earlier...get rid of it. You're giving Googlebot a nervous breakdown and it kind of looks sneaky to me. Why do you have a metarefresh forward that just loops back to the homepage? Think about what that does to an indexing bot, and maybe you'll see why this screws it up for you. Oh, I just looked at the cache lol! Now I know why you have that redirect there. Would you like some stuffed keyword with your spam? Really, now. And you have to ask why your site got slapped? I have nothing against hats of any color, but that's just...over the top. Or did an enemy hacker do that to you? Hard to imagine you doing that to your own forum. Did you buy this from someone?
LOL it's more Google FUD. We've all seen this coming for months. Google is going frantic about paid links because they work, and they don't want you getting free traffic. They know they can't do anything (much) about them algorithmically so all they can do is use their branding muscle to spread propoganda about getting punished, penalised, etc for selling links. And boy is it working ! People really believe everything that the almighty Google wants you to believe. Here's my take on it. Google have downgraded the little green bar almost right across the board - hitting many well known sites (some that sell links, and many that don't). Many innocent sites have been caught in the crossfire. But what have those sites really lost ? Check the SERPS. Has it killed their rankings ? HELL, NO ! Why ? Because toolbar PR has very very little to do with rankings. Never did, still doesn't, and never will. But Google doesn't want you to know that So just sit back, relax, let the masses panic, and watch the link prices crash. Then go pick up some great deals
I have a question about selling links: Do you mean the Links Directories or something else? Regards, ameran
I do not believe that Google is against selling links. You should imagine that the foundation of WWW is built for URLs and links and when you don´t have any links anywhere than nobody can find you. And sometimes you cannot get any link when you don´t pay for that. ;-) I bought many links and I got PR from 0 to 5. I believe you cannot give all responsibility to Google. You should find out what you have done wrong and try to do better now. Regards, ameran
For a start the domain PR does appear to belong to another url http://www.database-search.com/sys/pre-check-en.php This does not make sense to me, it seems that you are using some funny redirects.
Whoa! What the hell. That is weird. Maybe I've been hacked? Edit: I recognize this cached page. Sythe.org probably pointed to it about.... 5 years ago? These were something I wrote called 'google traps' which essentially focused and magnified pagerank. It was an experiment more than anything. So, this being the case, the PR drop is a technical error? Sythe.org no longer points to this trap, and hasn't for half a decade.
Googlebot is/was exempt from the redirect. My site gets a lot of http flood attacks, this redirect is part of my defense system. I will turn it off and see if google warms to the site more. I still think its google's fault, looking at that cache.
Its when kiddies mass a flood of HTTP requests on your site from one or more computers. Similar to a DDOS except they request actual pages. This in turn overloads apache and causes the server to either become inoperablely slow or apache to crash. Either way it results in downtime. Think of it as an automated version of some stupid kid, and their friends, hitting refresh on your index 10 times a second.
Sorry To read this but This time many have lost PR including many big sites . I have also lost PR from PR 5 to PR2 on one site
hi Sythe, seems some of bad linking is penalizing you, its not a PR drop in my views, its a penalty, dig dig dig and fix before you are totally out of google. google WT shows: Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Aug 14, 2007. Also i would recomend you to get the following page removed best of luck
I am in webmaster tools now. Apparently the site was unreachable during the last PR update. I suspect this has caused the problems.
yes another cause can be your page got crawled and being a non standard text and script it give you a penalty cause it reaches you. just my 2 cents
Update: Just discovered that google's crawl rate flatlined around 3 weeks ago. Turns out the techs who manage my server had put googlebot into the firewall's deny filter....... God I hate techs.