Bingo, and he is not alone. This has effected many others.

The category pages are still indexed however, so I don't think that this is a ban: Japamor is indexed.

I know others think that the pr update was messed up and this will self-correct, but my impression is not so optimistic. I fear that these noticeable PR changes are reciprical link penalties that are starting to go into effect, so lists and free-sites with nothing pointed to them but reciprical links -- including hardlink trades -- are getting hit the hardest. Older sites have kept their PR levels perhaps because of bookmarkers links, toplists that have pages pointing to them that have not made a displayable ranking, and perhaps Google is giving a nod to sites that have just been around longer.

It's also been suggested that linklists that are found to be spamming in one way or another are getting marked and sites that have reciprical links to these sites are getting penalized for being in a bad neighborhood.

I guess my point is Japamor is not alone and it will be interesting to see how this effects our business model in the long term.

Won't affect it all. It'll just make it worthless to submit free sites. :D

Japamor - if it makes you feel any better, I think my listings were dropped too. |boobies|

hmmm i a bit confused by all of this especially the "no pr" part. does this mean we need to let our free sites spin in cyberspace until they get some pr on them? or should we go ahead and submit and there is a time line that after so many days/weeks/months if no pr shows up, we'll be delisted? Does this override the "listing forever" post of a few months back?

did i mention i'm on drugs and cannot be trusted with a keyboard these days?

:D

Are these seem changes/dropped listings happening at Smut Gremlins? I can't seem to find my sites there either.

she has hee links set to expire as some of my not so old links are gone but more newer links are there, there are reasons for links to be removed after so long if your seo plan is focused around that

I too have had the waivering PR thing with my LLs category pages since the beginning, as I'm sure that most of us have, so I've never paid any attention to the PR voodoo. I've seen respected members of this board, with an abundance of SEO knowledge and experience, say time and time again that one shouldn't base link trades on PR, and I shall continue to follow their advice. That's what a reciprocal link on a free site is - a link trade. I link to you, you link to me, everyone is happy.

::gentlystirring::

Makes sense.

In that context, how do you (generic "you") handle those link lists which don't keep your free sites listed forever?

I mean, if I had a link trade with you, say between one of your link lists and one of mine, and you took my link down, it would seem to be fair/correct to take down your link on my site, right?

So, do you remove the recips for link lists which drop your free site listings based on a 'expire date' or do you leave the recips up?

If you remove the recip, do you replace it with another LL recip and then submit your free site to that LL? Or is it just build and forget, including forgetting that some LL won't list your free sites forever?

Let me make one thing clear - I am not solely basing this on the lack of PR - I'd be insane to do that.

I'm assuming there is a problem with the domain because of a number of things - it's been around for almost 2 years, I had 100 or so sites listed on my pages, so there are a lot of links to sites on this domain from Link Lists & whatnot. 1000 listing in Google with no links back to the domain caused concern as well. The 403 on the index baffled me and still does - I can't grasp a legit reason as to why it was left as 403 & not set up with any sort of page.

Based on the age & the number of links, there should be PR on the domain, but there isn't & that leads me to believe that there is a problem.

Hell, today I see no PR at all, which might be a good thing & does lead me to believe that it was the 403 on the index that caused the alleged problem.

Some have agreed with me & some haven't, but I feel it's better to be safe than sorry.

Bash me if you want - and if some PR appears, I can easily add the sites back in (I was planning ahead & saved the links I deleted in a separate file)

Could you clarify which domain you are speaking of. I assume that it's japamor.com since I never submitted 100 links to the LOR. ;) There may be some confusion at this point in the thread because some readers here now know that the links from whoringwives.com appear to have been dropped as well, though I haven't been given a confirmation on that.

I'm speaking about japamor.com - but I will now look into whoringwives.com as I was not aware of a problem (and you know I'd have said something to you if there was)

Links to whoringwives.com were removed on July 11th, but it was not blacklisted, which 99.44% of the time means there was a DNS issue. MML was not the one that ran the linkbot on that day, or I'd have heard about it. I'll ICQ you now.

Just a friendly follow-up - We we're both on a planes to Vegas on the 11th, so I can't say for sure what was going on with that domain. Only the free sites from that one domain were removed (luckily), but not the sites on my other two free site domains. A DNS issue would have been odd, but the server that my stuff has been on had been occasionally bogging, so that was probably the culprit - and that's one of the reasons that everything is being moved to new host. WW is now pretty much alone on the old VPS box and will get moved sometime this month. Sooner rather than later.

As far as the lists that 'expire' free site listings, I have, up until now, never really given that much thought. I honestly didn't realize that SG had that six month policy. If I was already editing a particular free site and I noticed that I had a recip up to a list that I knew wasn't linking back anymore, I might take the extra couple of seconds to take the link down and possibly replace it with another. Would I go looking for old free sites to remove recips under those circumstances? No. It's not worth effort and, in most cases, that link list would have given you much more traffic in those six months than what the value of that single non-recip link could ever make up for. Plus, if you want the big lists to retain their ability to provide loads of traffic, you want to see them doing well in the SEs. I believe non-reciprocated inbound links are part that success.

When it comes to other situations, such as never getting listed or having a listing dropped for other reasons, then yes - I do remove/replace those recips if I have the time and KNOW that the listing is dead. GG has offered to relist the dropped free sites and I had to admit to him that I've already begun replacing the LOR recip on that particular domain's free sites.

EDIT: And now the Green One just ICQ'd me to let me know that he has just re-added my sites anyway. Damn him!

Greenie - you know Im not gonna bash you - but the line of reasoning doesnt make any sense from a Link List point of view - unless Ive been out of the loop way too long - the point of listing free sites and providing a recip trade for that listing was all traffic based - and had no basis in where a free site ranked or for that matter, whether it was even listed in SE's?? Now I know that a few LLs have made a point of rewarding free sites that existed with Google rankings but that was extra bonus's - not the basis of acceptance for listing

The problem of not showing PR can probably be easily explained in this case because he doesnt do any interlinking within that domain - if he didnt have an index page that would make sense - and for that matter he may have a noindex in his robots text for Google - it doesnt matter though because that was never anywhere near a rule for acceptance - Google certainly doesnt show true PR anywhere and hasnt since almost two years ago - as well as their link: command being scaled back to just show a representative sample of links

If I were going to try to look at whether a domain is banned it sure wouldnt be in Googles index - I would use the domaintools whois tool as they will show blacklisting of domains for spam etc.

/added - I suppose if someone really wanted to go to the trouble of worrying about free sites having some acceptance in SEs - the first rule I would have to add is that I would be able to spider the robots.txt as Im sure there are some WMs out there that do prevent some robots from spidering their pages - I know of one host already that is used by some free site submitters that throttle robot flow and in some cases a free site submitter has (for some reason) prevented robots

Forget this domain, because I'm still thinking that the 403 on the index was the problem.

You would knowingly link to a site that you believe (or know for sure) is banned by Google or Yahoo or another popular search engine?

Greenie - first off I dont think that the 403 on the index would cause a removal - only if the 403 occured on the free site itself - I really dont care what they have on the root index unless its something objectional/against the rules - and Im pretty sure the bot you use doesnt check the index page on the root - just the sites listed - but that may just be something youre doing on the side that I didnt know :)

As far as the SE stuff - first - the keyword here is knowingly - and Id say that in pretty much every case Ive looked at where someone has posted that a domain is banned in Google - it was not - someone had looked at Google using thier little script tool or some other sites tools and decided that it was banned - which in Google is highly unlikely and very few and far between. Unfortunately a lot of "SEOs" have decided that Google bans sites/domains for all types of reasons - and this just isnt so - they may hand remove a domain/site based on some spam reports from the index - or go so far as to supplemental out some pages based on dupes - but banning at Google really is saved for extreme cases. Now if they are "not listed" that is a different scenario and can be caused by reasons ranging from not being crawled properly, not enough time since first crawled to be included, not linked to properly etc etc - hundreds of reasons - but none that would stop me as a linklist owner from listing the site.
I have looked at the tools that some of the "knowledgeable SEOs" are using to determine if a site is "banned" by Google, and all it checks is backlinks (which Google has already stated is fake), PR (which again Google has already stated is faked in the toolbar) and occasionally they mine into some areas of Google that they "interpret" to their liking for indicators of "bannedness"

So as I said - the keyword here is knowingly - and quite honestly there is no way to "know" because Google aint gonna tell ya

One other point is really to answer the question you asked Greenie - with an example - you and I know that there are quite a few link lists banned from Yahoo - myself being one of them, Hoes and others - and yet we all link to each other without caring about that, because we know that the trades we have are respected by Google (and they do have quite a bit more traffic :) ) and provide not only the natural linking structures we want but also do provide a good experience for our surfers (which is a heck of a lot more important than worrying about whether a free site is listed in yahoo)

I DIDN'T BAN THE DOMAIN BECAUSE OF THE 403 |banghead|

I DIDN'T BAN THE DOMAIN BECAUSE OF THE PR0 |banghead|

I DIDN'T BAN THE DOMAIN BECAUSE GOOGLE SHOWS ZERO LINKS BACK |banghead|

Linkster - let me rephrase the question - and a simple yes or no will do - would you list I site that you thought was banned by Google?

:)

Greenie - if I could ever figure out a site was banned by Google I would remove it - and I believe we did about 3 years ago for one link list that got banned

This whole fucking problem is becasue the root was 403 - if there was an index page in there, I would have never banned it.

But like I've said before, not once did it cross my mind that a legit webmaster that's owned a domain for almost 2 years would have a 403 index & only after all this came out in the open, realized that they could upload fucking files to the fucking root of the fucking domain.

If Japamor had an index page on this domain, would this thread even exisit?

We all make mistakes and adjustments have to be made. Looks like Japamor corrected his and is moving forward.

I don't know what all the fuss is about....getting listed is a privilege not a right and if GG decides it's in his best interest to pull some links then it's his right to do so without having to answer to anyone. I was one of the first to get my links pulled and was dumbfounded when he told me that there was actually a problem with the domain. The drop in traffic stung a little but I respected what he was doing and have no problem with it.

I have more of a problem with Google in trying to figure out what happened with my domain as it only contained freesites and an index page of my freesites and a few links to paysites. When I figure out how to remedy the problem with my domain I'll resubmit my sites. Thanks GG for the heads up |thumb

If this was in Celtic's robots.txt file, would it have caused his problem?
"User-agent: *
Crawl-Delay: 20"

Thanks Chop - the voice of reason.

Well, I've certainly learned my lesson and I've now put an index page on my domain.

My domain is banned by LOR and my last site has been refused today by another LL as a result of this thread. Can anyone explain why I am also blacklisted on
http://bl.usefulscripts.com/blocked/search.phtml
for the reason given being 'google issues'. And how the hell do I get off it?

It seems that the most sensible thing I can do in the future is submit from another domain or, more likely, several domains. If Google relent about japamor.com I'll start using that again.

Just to clarify - I didn't put the robots.txt file up - like alot of webmasters (I'm presuming) I didn't have a robots.txt file up but I'm presuming that when I was trying out a link list/directory script and it was put up during the install and when I took the script down alas it remained unnoticed. Not sure if it was the cause of my downfall but after searching the domain it was the only thing suspect I could find.

japamor - I actually added your sites back in with this morning's update & I removed you from the blacklist as well.