Thank you for your candid answer about whitebar/greybar. I'd rather folks say 'nobody knows for sure' than fill up the air with fluff.

Do banned sites still show up in "cache:mysitename.com" searches?

Part of my problem is that I can't get any reply out of Google whatsoever. I'll be glad to cooperate with anything they say they have a problem with, or wait if its something they need to do, or whatever. But I just can't get them to even acknowledge me, and that makes it very difficult to fix problems.

Thanks to the folks here for helping me find that line of text, I've killed it. I don't think linking to my own store is a problem, if it is I would like more substantial proof before I go around ripping out the guts of a well-established store that pays my rent nicely.

If it is just that line of text, it's gone. There were also some dead pages, I scrubbed out old internal links to those so now you don't get 404 error anymore. If there's anything else, who do I need to kill to get Google to tell me what it is ;)

Duplicate content filter - how good can this thing be if it cans the real site and leaves the crappy garbage fake stuff behind?