An Open Letter to Matt Cutts

Posted to mattcutts.com (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/two-search-interviews/) 23 Apr 2008
-- as of this moment, 4/23/08, 10pm GMT, it remains to be seen if it will be displayed or deleted.

Dear Matt

I am replying to <snip> (your comment):

"Andy, yes: we can manually remove or otherwise penalize sites on incidents that we consider to be webspam."

So, now, almost 2 years in Google Purgatory following an October '06 sudden pagerank drop from 5 to 0 for a large information site that has been in development for 7 years -- after many re-writes, after 3 thorough and apologetic reinclusion requests, hundreds of copyscape checks, articles, submissions, hired consultants, listening to all your video & audio casts -- pagerank is still 0.  

The site is included in Google search results.  Yahoo shows 131,000 pages indexed and 34,000 inlinks from other sites (excluding the site).  Lots of these inlinks are from university websites.  Google shows 62,000 pages and the inlinks vary from 22 to 1,000 depending on exactly how you write the query.

I am desperate.  I have some ideas what happened (javascript redirects to get search engines to index frames navigation), and all that is corrected, no more frames, no more javascript.  Pagerank is still 0, and placement in search results is abysmal.

Have I offended the gods?  Has my long and colorful history caught up with me?  (traveling hippy, Chicago convention, Woodstock, back to the earth, construction worker, technical sales, webbie, grandfather & now expat)  Is this endless humbling just another step on the path of the Buddha, driving me to begging with a wooden bowl?  Paranoia takes over -- do I have an old enemy working for Google?

I have written a 1 page website hundred-thousand-dollar-reward.com (gosh I hope that's not a signature link) (and no it's not a link in the posting itself).  Maybe, just maybe, somebody can help me here -- really this is serious, looking for white hat only, and/or some inkling of what I can do to be a first-class citizen again.