I have a site that was suddenly graybarred. I figured out why (I think) and corrected the issue. Does anyone have experience coming back after being graybarred? How long does it usually take?
I'd say your best bet would be to do a Google Reinclusion Request. http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/15504.htm Other than that, It most likely be anywhere between 6 months - a year (Usually, as long as you aren't doing whatever you were doing previously)
Is the "grey bar" => "penalized" thing still true? I thought that was abandoned. Most of the time thses days when I see a gray bar it's either a temporary Google server issue or it's a problem with the Google Toolbar.
I look for both a "grey bar" and I check to see if the site has any pages indexed before I make any conclusions on a possible banning of a site from Google.
It refers to the Google Toolbar PageRank graph. PR = 0 shows as a white bar. Sometimes, the bar is grey and the tooltip will say not PR=0 but "no PageRank information available. In the past, this was thought to indicate that a site had been penalized ion some way. As noted, I'm not sure that this is the case today.
THe best bet to see if your site is banned is to check how many pages are indexed in Google. If you go from all indexed to none indexed then you might have been axed.
A Grey Bar would be when the PageRank Bar (located on Google Toolbar) shows a grey color rather then White or green to indicate a pagerank value. When the bar is grey, it could mean the website either isn't indexed yet or crawled by google or it has a penalty assigned to it by google. Meaning a complete ban sometimes of the entire website. 2. Yes the greybar still indicates a penalized website as many websites such as cloaker program websites that are banned are greyed out for example.
Your correct. I wouldn't rely on it as well. However when your skeeming thru many of websites for either potential buyings or other things. It has an okay indicator for a quick glance. I find it working pretty good, however if I need to investigate more I would actually check properly by checking Google, incoming links, age and other factors to see if its banned.