I have a site for which I spend about $2,000 in google adwords. (but that's not the issue here). I have always had a respectable page rank in the actual search listings. Usually in the top 1-5 positions for the main keywords and products, This weekend, I noticed our sales dropped to about half the normal level. I checked our site on Google and we were missing entirely from the directory. I did the test to see if we were missed or banned, and as of last night at 2am, you could still click on a link to see our site (the 3 bullet scenario many have described). I wrote to Google before going to bed at around 2am EST, and I kindly asked them to check into it for me. I woke up and checked again and we went to the "2 bullet" scenario, with no link to our actual URL -- the scenario that many describe as an outright ban from Google. What's weird, though, is that this happened between 2am and 9am and I had not changed anything. I always tried to maintain a decent keyword density, but nothing obnoxious. My other sites are still ranked fine. Any possible explanations besides being outright banned? And didn't google supposedly start a program to notify sites when they are banned? In the meantime, my adwords continue to perform well (if I was, in fact, banned). I guess if they ban you, they still don't have a problem taking your money. Thanks for any insights you might have!
Sorry to say that if this turns into a Website Review, it will be deleted since the OP doesn't have enough posts for a review. A mere generic discussion is OK though.
I think I'll keep this from turning into a review of the site, but suffice to say it has me scratching my head. I supposed we could have been banned for an old redirect from when we were on Yahoo store -- but I literally had each page redirect to the new page on the new server (the yahoo store subdomain cannot be pointed a new store). But that redirect had been there for almost a year -- at which point I was going to pull the site (the goal was to leave yahoo store platform but not render all legacy links to our site useless). I should add that I could not use 303 redirects on yahoo's platform, so I used a javacript redirect to send the old site to the new one. (the US Post Office recently did something like this to their site and it seemed to be perfectly legit). Anyway, last night it looked as though we were off google, but not banned. Now it looks like a ban, and that was 2-3 days after traffic dropped off and within 7 hours of me writing to google at 2am Eastern Time. I don't know, maybe they have some niteowls working there and banning sites? When I go to the Google sitemaps page, i still see rankings. When I look at pagerank, the bar is solid white and not gray. But we are off Google, it seems. And just this one site. (Another legitimate thing we do is to have affiliate sites that look like our site. A major magazine publisher sells some of our products and they wanted a skinned version of our site. That version of the site, almost identical in every way, is still up and running fine.
The 3 bullets are back now. We are still not listed, but we are not showing that sign of being banned.
Thats rough! It seems thats the risk you play though when being online that rankings can dramatically change. Hopefully all will come back up for you.