Well, now my blog is down from 3 to zero (page rank achieved within 3 weeks) and I know why… Learn from my mistakes; learn how not to get slapped (or spanked) by Google!
How I was slapped
When my previous webhoster suspended my account without any warning (due to traffic spike or whatever), I was left without a latest backup of my previous wordpress blog posts. I managed to retrieve some posts through caches from MSN, Yahoo and Gigablast. (Search engines DO NOT keep a copy of pages you’ve blocked from cache-ing via your Robots.txt ) But still many blog posts were missing!
So when Google realised it almost 3 months later that blah blah number of pages missing from MyQute.com they gave MyQute blog a spank. That explains why my page rank now is 0!
But all is not lost because this doesn’t mean my blog has been blacklisted.
How do I know? Cos my blog is still listed on page 1 of Yahoo for “girly wordpress” and page 5 of Google for the same keywords.
In order to get my Page Ranking back, it means I have to re-do my robots.txt to exclude blog links that are no longer existing. Or I need to re-direct EVERY lost link to a proper 401 Not Found page, which is more intensive work for me! (I’m working on this soon!)
Hiding Directory Reciprocal Links May Earn You a Google Slap
There’s many other ways in which you, blog-masters and blog-mistresses, can get spanked where Google Page Ranking is concerned —> one way is by hiding any links (reciprocal or not) via CSS and “invisible” div tags, which is considered a much more serious “offense”.
With the increasing number of Blog Directories refusing to have their links placed on a seperate Links Page, that will mean bloggers have no other choice but to include reciprocal links on their homepages. If you don’t want that, it’s only fair to either pay for link submission, or not to submit your links to those directories at all. (When you’ve submit links to directories, you agree to their terms of service so why break those terms only to have them delete your links later?)
More info in articles/blogs:
Matt (GoogleMaster) interviewed on StoneTemple
Shimon Sandler’s 14 ways to Hidden Text – Ways to get blacklisted via Google
