LOR - my sites have gone

[Linkster]

Originally Posted by Greenie

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

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.


Bash me if you want - and if some PR appears

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

[Greenguy]

Originally Posted by Linkster

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...

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?

[Linkster]

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

[Linkster]

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)

[Chop Smith]

Originally Posted by Linkster

and for that matter he may have a noindex in his robots text for Google

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

[CelticTiger]

Originally Posted by Chop Smith

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

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.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Chop Smith

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

I don't know why that would have caused a problem. Unless maybe it was misunderstood/mistaken for something else. All it should do is tell a bot how long to wait between crawls. The crawl-delay only works when supported, which I believe is by the bots for some search engines: Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. (It's not supported by Google's bots I believe... anyone know for sure?)

I could see someone getting upset at things you might do with the noindex, nofollow, disallow directives. But a crawl-delay of 20 seconds can't be used to do anything nasty/tricky as far as I know... and someone please correct me if I'm missing something here.