Google reconsideration – I promise to be good
If the hostmaster of Family Fortunes were to ask: ‘Name a company that is involved with the internet’, there would be no big prises for guessing who would be top of the list. Google is synonomous with the internet, it is the lifeblood of the web. Without google’s ability to connect people to the information they are looking for, the internet would be a very different place.
Webmasters are (generally) clued in to this, and will go to all sorts of efforts to get google to like their site – building links, making sure there is plenty of keyword rich content etc etc. But then they get a bit greedy, start pushing the boundaries… start doing things, not because their reader will like them, but because they think google will like them – and thinking that google will reward them with a higher rankings. The simplest examples are bloating out the bottom of the page with ‘hidden text’ (ie text that is the same colour as the background), or getting involved with dodgy recipricol link building schemes. Short term results to these initial efforts often prove fruitful – so our webmaster gets little bit bolder – starts pushing the boat out a bit further –until suddenly he realises he has actually been pushing his boat up a certain creek – and guess what he’s done with his paddle!
Banned from Google !!!
Yes that’s right – Google has cottoned on to your games and has kicked you right out of its index. At first you think it’s probably just a temporary thing – google has got its knickers in a bit of a twist, and it’ll be grand once the update from another datacenter rolls in. And then you wait… Three weeks later and your web stats look like someone has pulled the plug on your heart support. You know for sure that you are in trouble when a search for ‘site:yourdomain.com’ brings up nada – so where do you go from here?
Beg for forgiveness
One of Googles’ god-like qualities is its ability to forgive – and it has provided a wonderful little ‘reinclusion request’ tool for exactly this situation. It has found you to be up to no good and has kicked you out of its index, but if you clean up your act and promise never to steal again, then google might – just might – find it in its heart to forgive you.
The first step is to figure out what exactly you did wrong and fix it. There is a fair chance you will know yourself where you crossed the line. You need to get your site sorted out – remove all those dodgy links, tidy up your title tags, check your keyword density… all those boundries that you had pushed that little bit too far. You need to make sure your site is squeaky clean before you even think of using this tool – think of it as an opportunity to make radical changes to your design and sitemap structure – the old site is gone, so you may as well make the most of the opportunity. And then once you have your site ready, go to googles webmaster tools and look down the right hand side for the link to the reinclusion request.
Googles Reconsideration request link within Googles Webmaster Tools
This request will be looked at by a human – and Google does not like its humans spending too much time on each site – so be sure to take your time when filling in this application – it could make the crucial difference between a successful re-inclusion and being dumped for good!
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