A couple of months ago I would have agreed with that Dave, but after studying this "new" meta refresh google bug I'm not so sure.

Have you tried the copy test Andy? Pick a unique copy string from your index page and search for it in quotes, and see if it shows up as being on one of the sites which are now redirecting to your zeroed site.

Or, see if it shows up on domains which are not owned by your friend.

We have tried all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately I think it might be hosed at the moment. We have tried all kinds of searches and its coming up with nothing, however he also told me the site dropped PR some time ago , not recently so that could be why a lot of stuff has gone away. I wasn't aware of this and thought it went to PR0 within the last couple months, but it has been > 6 mos.

Andy

With the copy test I'm talking about, you are not looking to see your test site (that is, the zeroed site you are talking about) come up in the search, you are looking to see if other domains come up showing the unique text that should only be found on your test site.

This is a way of seeing if someone else is either deliberately or accidentally duplicating your text.

6 months back still allows this zeroed site to be affected by the meta-refresh bug. When did your friend set up the redirects to this site- before or after it zeroed?

What is most likely with a zero like that is that the google algo decided your friends site was spamming, and they have penalized it.

But there are a few other possibilities, including the "new" google bug I'm talking about.

site:yourdomain.com yourdomain.com

put that in the google search box, if you have any pages at all indexed, you aren't banned on that domain.