Site back after two years

E-mailed google and it worked

[Magnum_PI]

I have to admit I'm surprised. I was very skeptical about posts I had read that if you cleaned up your site and e-mailed google they might bring it back.

This site is the core of my business and we did some hard core marketing back in 1999 which got it blocked probably about two years ago. It was a last ditch effort when I e-mailed google. It came back about 6 weeks after my e-mail. I didn't receive an e-mail notification that it was back so it may have been quicker than 6 weeks.

Steps we took to clean it up:
1) Took out links to other banned sites
2) Eliminated old 1999 era doorway pages (I had forgot about those)
3) Made sure there was no duplicate content

FYI, we have two other sites that are also blocked and were cleaned up but we have not e-mailed google yet. These sites have NOT returned so I'm fairly sure it was the e-mail to google that did it.

[Stefan]

Congratulations, Magnum. The email reinclusion request actually worked, eh? Amazing.

Now that your site is back in Google, you can start worrying about it getting the chop during the next algo tweak... ;-)

[ILuvSrchEngines]

How do you know it was blocked? What was the indication? 0 PR? Did not show in Google at all? What?

Also, I hate to say anything negative while you are in such a festive mood, but... Sometimes people get a temporary listing with G and find out they are back to the bottom with the next index. All that Google filtering takes a month or two to do it's dirty work.

I hope that does not happen to you.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Congratulations Magnum but what do you mean by back? Do you mean that your site is back in the index or back with with good SERPs?

Just being "back" in the index is as beneficial as an ashtray on a motorcycle. Are you getting traffic and do you have good PR?

[Magnum_PI]

It had been grey barred out for a couple years. It's showing now with a PR2, not showing on searches yet. It has hundreds of legit backlinks from related industry sites (no reciprocals)and has about 300 pages of unique content for it's genre. It will be interesting to see how or if pagerank climbs back up.

[yaelede]

It had been grey barred out for a couple years

As I know white bar means penalty (with an old site surely), if you were greyed-out, you were not in Google index for some other reason (flash content, robots.txt..?).