Four Years Later, SearchKing Regains Google PR

[unreviewed]

And a PR 7 at that. Must feel good Bob?

[Marcia]

It seems kind of silly that the penalty would stick forever, when so many have been doing so much of the same thing (and more) for so long. This seems like the right thing to do; good for Google.

So far PR is only showing on the main page, but it must feel plenty good for Bob to see that after all this time!

[dannysullivan]

Some background for those who might not realize the importance of this:

Google Sued Over PageRank Decrease: From Feb. 2002, overview of the case that was filed against Google.

SearchKing Google Rank Restored and The SearchKing Google controversy revisited: From Nov. 2002, on SearchKing beginning to rank again for some terms but the PageRank score itself apparently not back to "normal."

Google Asks Court to Dismiss SearchKing Lawsuit and SearchKing update: preliminary injunction denied: From Jan. 2003, on preliminary injuction being denied.

Court dismisses Google search-fixing case: From June 2003, on a court ruling that PageRank is Google's opinion and that what's "normal" is whatever Google wants it to be.

[bhartzer]

All I can say is: wow. I never thought that would happen. Never. Perhaps there's some hope for banned domains; and maybe this is proof that there's more than just a 90 day penalty? From what I've heard, all banned domains are "re-reviewed" after 90 days. Maybe there's also another penalty, the 6 year penalty.

[Bojon]

I was once told by a Google engineer that a year long penalty is not unusual.

[Elisabeth]

Brad -

{short side bar, this thread will not go any further off track than this}
Check your email on the post deletion issue. PM is the preferred way for us to easily notify members of post removals, but you have yours disabled.
{/sidebar}

There is plenty of history on the SK lawsuit and penalty issue, but this thread is intended solely to talk about the lifting of that penalty, period.

[Marcia]

I was once told by a Google engineer that a year long penalty is not unusual.

It's in another thread here from a while back, but it would take forever to find. It seems that there can be a "timed release" on penalties, some lasting 30 days, 3 months, some 6 months, etc., once the cause has been corrected. So a year long penalty, or even possibly longer, makes sense thinking back about that.

[Marcia]

<sidebar>
Let's keep personal, private communications confined to PM's and stay within the topic (and within the T&C per the FAQ), which is the restoration of SK, without speculations that can't be backed up, just staying with what's verifiable.

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/...07&postcount=7

Thanks!
</sidebar>

[evilgreenmonkey]

Is a PR7 really that surprising?

With so much publicity surrounding the case, how many well respected news and information sites linked across to SearchKing. The pages which did so would be highly relevant to the search industry (relevant on-topic natural linking) with inbound links themselves from smaller sites and blogs (giving that page further relevance and credibility).

Simple when you think about it

[Dugger]

I think Google is feeling generous - one of my sites that went PR0 in November 2001 (for no apparent reason at the time) just came back at PR5. Back then a lot of sites went PR0 - anybody else besides SearchKing and me back from the dead?

[broomd]

We took over a site in 2003 that had been banned entirely from Yahoo, Google and MSN. It was redeveloped and all SPAM techniques that had been implemented on the site were entirely removed. This was back in 2004.

About one year ago, the site started to showing up in MSN SERPS for its real estate related keywords. Yahoo and google still continued to ban the site and still do continue to ban the site from SERPS.

A few days ago (around April 17th) we noted that the site had a page rank of 6 (it had a PR of 0 prior to that time due to ban). I am very skeptical as to whether this page rank increase will have any positive outcome on the sites banning from the google SERPS pages.

Does anyone know if a PR rank being restored indicates that a site may return to SERPS? If not, how do you get a site to get off the banned list? We have been waiting for nearly 3 years now.

[massa]

All I will say is that before the toolbar showed the PR increase, www.searchking.com was like #8 for a search for SearchKing at Google. Now, today at least, it is #1. Still #15 at Yahoo.

AND, I'm assuming it will stay there as long as Google and Yahoo lets it.

Does that help?

[broomd]

Our site does not even rank under its own domain name minus the .com. People who have linked to our site are ranked no problem...... I will keep an eye out and let you know if this PR change eventually leads to inclusion in the SERPS.

[Dugger]

In my case, the return from PR0 has resulted in the site now being found for some searches. It actually has "related" sites (similar pages) now too which it did not when it was PR0

[massa]

Boy, one tiny little innocuous post and less than 24 hours later it drops from #1 to #4. Probably just a coincidence because I find it hard to imagine anyone would care enough one way or the other to take the time to push down a result for it's own domain name.