Removing Grey Barred Sites
I recently downloaded the google toolbar as it was recommended to me. Looking at my site it seems that a lot of older pages have been slapped by google for being naughty! I’m not quite sure what I have done exactly and looking at other bloggers pages they seem to have the same thing done to them. I am talking about page rank. Everybody knows that it’s not totally important these days but it definitely still pays a part in where you end up in the search engine rankings. Although ajn1.com has not been banned from google completely (grey barred), the older pages seem to have been penalized.
I watched a short SEO video recently which said that you may well be punished for linking to bad websites. I have just spent the last hour or so searching this site to make sure I am NOT linking to any bad sites.. What I actually found was a minefield of links to bad sites! (Although I noticed that even facebook was grey barred which I thought was strange.)
I’m not sure if I’m just being paranoid about this but I’ve now removed every single link on ajn1.com which directs to a ‘bad site’. Again I’m not sure how google works out that these websites have done something naughty as it’s quite a big secret.
Anyway… I better not bad mouth master google for fear of being punished further. The main point is that I have now tried to make the site as google friendly as possible.
June 30th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Doing a bit of research into ‘grey barred’ sites I found that there is more than one reason why a site may be ranked as such. There are three different types of ‘grey barred’ sites
1. Google wants to hide the page rank information
2. Banned sites
3. New sites (not yet ranked)