Have I been banned/penalised?

Hi all! This is my first post to this forum so please be gentle on me

I've been reading various posts on PR on this board and after following some advice that was given to another member, I added the robots.txt to my site www.tnarobag.com. My site has gone from a PR3 to a PR4 which is good, however the PR on the index page is greyed out!

What have I done wrong? It seems to have been removed from the google search listing but all the other pages are still there. When searching for the keyword "TNA" I have also dropped from #9 to #16

Have I been penalised or banned for some reason?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

welcome, medusa.

Your site is doing fine and not penalized. Google index update has moved from every 4 weeks to continuous update. It's normal to see ranking fluctuation.

I have a links.asp file with my outgoing links. G gives it a pr5. I hear on here that it is a no-no to have a file with a name of links.asp. If that is true, why does G give it a pr of 5?

Google doesn't count backlinks from certain types of pages (page with a filename links.html, for instance) when calculating PR. It doesn't affect the PR of the page itself. The problem is that people may not want to exchange links with your site if they figured out the links from your links.html page are ignored by Google

General question: We are very particular who we exchange links with, but have more and more linking to us without a reciprocal. How does any of links on our links page help us with pr? I would think incoming links are where it is at.

I don't understand! I've now gone down to PR3 again.. it just happened. Any ideas? Does it update that regularly???

The changes I made since this morning are:
1. Removed extra "TNA" from meta-keyword
2. Removed robots.txt & code which points to it
3. Added 6 new pages under Products section

Has this affected my PR? I've noticed that my google ranking has gone up to #9 where it was originally.

Also my PR is still greyed out on my homepage www.tnarobag.com

I'm so confused

I get a pr of 4 on your home page when I access your site. Must have patience, G, if watched constantly, will make you go crazy.

none of those items are highly critical.
dont sweat your flux in pagerank.
it will settle.
i would suggest...however...that you get some more text content on your index page.
there is very little content for google to nibble on.
the big blue graphic is useless.
the big flash header is useless.
they are attractive...but they offer nothing text-worthy to the bots.
same goes for all of the other pages.




.

Thanks for the tip relaxzoolander!

I'm actually about to remove the big blue advert on the homepage but not the flash. I can't really think of anything else to put there :S

its not so much the removal of those items as it is the addition of more text that is important.




.

I understand. I should have added that I am about to promote our new product in the Available Now section using text as opposed to a graphic.

I'm also going to add more news items onto the site. Hopefully that will do it..

My next challenge is to work on our search listing & I guess PR while im at it... Problem is that it is difficult to find good websites to link from as the packaging industry doesn't seem to have many high rating websites! I've tried to list us into main directories & I'm waiting to see what DMOZ come back with but there just aren't many more options (that I can think of anyway!).

PR of a page is derived from its incoming links. Your link page boosts your PR 'cause it helps you get more incoming links.
The mathematical formula of PageRank is simple but recursive.

See Google PageRank basics, secrets and common misunderstandings.

Have you joined or visited the DMOZ Forum? It is a much more effective way to get listed than through their formal listing request form on their site. You get right to the editor. ;)

Yes I have! You can't actually request to be listed via the forum (from what i can tell) but you can talk directly with the editors and ask them if your site has been declined or awaiting review.

The website I submited is still waiting to be reviewed..

Correct, you have to request inclusion first. I was able to get listed in two categories through the forum contacts. The editors are difficult, to say the least. Riht now we are trying to get one category changed. They won't even respond until you wait at least a month.