Site Banned / How to tell?

[brazz]

Originally posted by Bill
That's a harder question, because it brings up the spectre of the "permanent zero".

Permanent zeros are domains that, for some reason that has yet to be determined, stay zeros no matter what you do to them, even tho they are clearly not banned, and their pages do still stay in the serps, just never placing very well.

All the permanent zero's I know about are older domains, from 2001 or earlier.

Bottom line is there is no way to know for sure wether any specific domain has a "permanent zero" without watching it over time. (and there's a lot of dispute over what perm zero's actually are... I suspect they are an old penalty google once applied, but no longer uses.)

If it's a newer domain chances are it just has no good backlinks. Check its backlinks- if the existing backlinks should have given it a higher pagerank, be a little cautious.

Only way to know for sure is to give it some good backlinks and watch it over time. Since "official" pr is only updated a few times a year now, it takes a while for this test to work.

In 2000/2001, Google applied a major penalty.
I was punished because I had used the doorway generator of WebPositionGold; at the time, I saw folks with heavily interlinked domains also being punished. The penalty was PR0 and a sharp drop in referrals and bot visits; not even sites with listings in dmoz and Y! were forgiven.

I kept the sites until early this year, in hopes that they would come back (they remained at dmoz all along, and I added some links); I sent mails to G asking for reinclusion, to no avail. This year, I gave up and didn´t renew the domains.
I only kept one of the domains, because of the Y! listing. It didn´t have doorways, but I believe it was considered guilty by association. This domain is PR0 until today, it is cached by G, but I hardly see any referrals.

Google is merciless, sometimes.