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What Happen Last Week Was An Opener For Me
Filed Under (Announcement, Blogging Tips) by Alvin on 21-11-2007

Just recently about 6 days ago, two major incidents happen to me lately and I was really puzzled as to why it happened. I got lots of emails and quick messages from friends online asking me what happen so I decided to share it out in here in this post.
I got hit really badly from two major sites recently. One of them was my page rank was ranked zero by Google & the other worst cast was my account at Hostgator got suspended.
1. How My Page Rank Became Zero
Firstly I do not use any black hat (illegal) methods to drive traffic to my websites so when I got page rank zero I was truly suprised I got ranked so low. From research these are some of the possible reasons.
- I had a widget on my blog at that time showing a page rank 4 but during this month I got a mini slammed and it became 3 but I forgot to update the widget and it still shows 4. Because of THAT Google flagged me for showing a fake ranking and it valids Google’s TOS that is why my rank now is zero.
- Another possible reason some rumors said was there were text links sold on my blog which cause the rank drop. But from experience it should not drop so low until zero, normally just a drop about minus 1.
- Another possible reason, I noticed I accidentally put gambling links on my blog within me noticing them through comments by people who post on this blog which maybe another possible reason for this.
So if you currently have a blog make sure you check the following above and make sure you do not have them to prevent yourself from getting page rank zero.
However The SHOCKING THING Was This
My search engine traffic still remain the same and I still got many keywords ranked in the top 10 results that drive me lots of traffic. From what I am experiencing now I am guessing Google has a page rank for my website just that they masked it without me knowing. Those who are experience in SEO will know that page rank may play a part in search engine ranking but amazing I still have words ranked in the top 10 in Google and it driving more traffic now actually then before.
2. How My Hosting Account From Hostgator Got Suspended!
Hostgator has been around for many years, in fact there are one of the most reliable host I found online and that was the reason I use them. I have been with them for about 15 months and so far there were no down times but only this very unlucky suspension of account.
The only reason why I got suspended was because Hostgator had a very strict rule when it comes to spamming online. Just recently one of my domains which is part my Hostgator account was flagged spam. It was flagged because on last Saturday one of my domains accidentally sent out 200 emails to people in an hour which flagged Hostgator.
Because of that one reason, my account was suspended for 4 days! As an experience webmaster what they just did to me was good thing because it shows they really take care of their server from misused users who are sharing the same server in shared hosting. If your web host do not control spamming you will encounter lots of problem later on when trying to sent emails to your friend through your server so by control the shared resources within the server it will keep everyone’s account healthy.
After further research the main cause of this spam was because one of my websites was so popular during a peak hour that it actually sent out 200 emails at one time by a Tell A Friend script - A Tell A Friend script is basically a simple program I have on my website that allows others to tell their friends about what I do. So what happen that night, I got about 30 to 40 people online telling over 200 of their friends my web services and that caused Hostgator to suspend my account =P
So if you are currently using any form of Tell A Friend script I strongly recommend you stop it before you own host suspend you. I hope you find this article useful and feel free to leave your comments below with your thoughts.