I’m not exactly sure why it had been demoted to a 3, but that is the black hole that is Google. People can pretend to know why things have happened, but unless you’re on the inside, you really just guessing.

I decided last week to try and do something about it!

I’ve been a member of the Google webmasters program from about when it started, and made sure to add Most Inspired right from the beginning.

I hadn’t logged in a while since I’d already verified my sites, and added the sitemaps. When I logged in I noticed something that I hadn’t seen before.

Most Inspired was still being index by Google, and provides a stream of steady visitors, but clicked the link anyway. On the detailed page I found the relevant bit:

If your site isn’t appearing in Google search results, or it’s performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our webmaster guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site.

I followed the link and made sure Most Inspired wasn’t violating any of the guidelines, which I don’t believe it ever was, and them submitted my reconsideration request. You can only do this if you’ve added and verified ownership of the website in your Google Webmasters account.

The help page states that reconsideration can take many weeks, but on Friday I noticed that my PR was now up at 6! Wow! I have heard nothing from Google, but the volume of requests they get, probably means replying to everyone is unlikely.

Since I never heard back from Google its hard to exactly why Most Inspired was slapped in the first place. They only thing I can think of is that I used to use Text-Link-Ads on the website (which I’ve since removed), there was some rumors that this would cause problems, but I don’t know for sure.

It’s hard to tell what affect this is having on my search engine traffic, since this is a holiday weekend in the US and traffic is usually lower, but it makes me feel better.