As most old timers know - the renowned directory was once penalized by Google some 2 years back. At that time - the site was completely BANNED by Google with no index at all. Just noticed yesterday that it has come back on the first page for its own domain name without the TLD and also has 16K plus indexed pages PR (though nobody cares for it these days) still remains 0 though it has some high quality do-follow and organic links from .EDU sites and also few PR6 backlinks from w3.org Although not related to this section - even JohnChow has come out of Google penalization. The interesting point is -- Although Google BANNED and Punished them - none of them lost traffic What's your opnion?
wow, it does come back to index and surely it is a quality web directory. I would like to know how the owner did to get it back. thanks for your info to share.
Hello... Holy Cow! i cant believe it... it was banned back as far as i can recall 2005-6,... Well it always had great traffic whether google decided to like it or not this was one directory that never gave up! Congrats to the owner on his recovery laterz malcolm
I had bought a few listings in uncoverthenet over the years (a couple of them after they were penalized by Google), and I've always thought it a nice directory. I don't exactly what caused their penalization but a good guess would be buying high PR links to increase their pagerank. Back in the day, there was a PR9 page on the W3 website that listed "donors" who gave donations to the W3 (I believe it was $XXXX minimum). But that was at the height of the PR craze where it seemed everyone was obsessed with gaining PR...as if PR actually earned you money. It seems most webmasters have wised up nowadays.
While pagerank is really of no importance, they've truly appeared to have gained what counts most; SERPs Good for them
I want to ask why the SERPs would be back while the content has no difference, does the Google algorithm get cold? otherwise the PR is suck.
Just to make things little bit clearer -- They were never penalized like most of our directories -- BUT.............. They were COMPLETELY BANNED with not even home-page being indexed. Also -- it still has few PR6 do-follow links from w3.org -- What wonders me is -- as Google says - most of the things it does depend on its much publicized algorithm - how can this site still has PR0 Has Google even penalized w3.org ? (stripped it of the power to give PR value to sites it gives links due to its editorial standards?) ORRRR - has all pages of major Non-profit sites with donation page been stripped of this power? Whatever, its really nice to see the site back as I have quite few listed there
am i the only one to see this google mess or am i too sleepy to be seeing this: search query 1 search query 2 hit me !!! M.