Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
1. If a formerly nicely ranking website now appears as: "Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.mysite.com" when you seach on its domain name, should I ask for reinclusion? (The site is totally innocent - for those who saw some of my posts in the Bourbon thread, its the site about my cat - nothing sleazy or black hat about it whatsoever! Black hat... she's not even a black cat!)
2. If my website got way trashed by Bourbon (like, Google traffic down 90%) but is still in the SERPs, should I send in a reinclusion request? (This is about my other, much larger site.)
3. Does reinclusion mean just for the homepage URL or every page that I think got trashed? (I hope this isn't the latter - we're talking nearly 1,000 pages over several sites!)
4. How do I send a reinclusion request to Google?
5. What do I say to them?
That's what I'd like to know. Anyone else can add pertinent questions too. Hopefully some of you will have pertinent answers! :-)
Once you are sure your site is ok you can send a reinclusion request from the Google support page. Include as much detail as possible about any problems you have found and what you have done to correct it. You will also have to say that you won't break the rules again (and mean it!) Depending on the problems you have found and how long you were using spam techniques for you are likely to be excluded for a while. However, other possible reasons for being dropped include your server being down when the crawler came around or lack of links, in which case you might find that your site will come back after it has been crawled again or once you get some good incoming links.
You need to find our what the problem was before sending a reinclusion request to Google.
The larger site is still in the SERPs, although in a much reduced manner. Is reinclusion an option in this case, if it complies with all that Google decrees? (And it most likely does - I'd scan it with a fine tooth comb to make sure, but there's no reason why it shouldn't. It's one of those "authority" content-type sites) Or is reinclusion pointless since it's already, to a certain extent, included already?
>>Google doesn’t drop a site for no reason<<
What planet are you from? Sure Google drop sites for no reason and they say so themselves: “Each time we update our database of webpages, our index shifts: we find new sites, we lose some sites, and sites' rankings change.”
Sites can also get hijacked with various 302 redirecting methods which can cause Google to penalize the site in question with duplicate penalty.
Sites are effectively dropped from Google once they sink into the supplemental index. Once stuck in the supplemental index your site will never return. If the index page is just listed by URL with no description you are in the supplemental results.
Requesting a re-inclusion request is a waste of time. I have started several posts to get a consensus from other webmaster to see if anyone has been successful - the answer is always NO. The only reply Google sends you for submitting a re-inclusion request is a meaningless canned response.
Is there such a thing as a 'penalty removal' request?
>I thought GoogleGuy said they would be processing reinclusion requests last Monday?<
Unfortunately and with all due respect, it seems that GoogleGuy words in this connection are empty ones. Several friends have done exactly what GG told them to do , also in other threads, but they got ZERO results.
Even if a site drops out for what appears to be no reason to you or me, I am sure that Google will have their own reasons. As far as reinclusion requests are concerned I am in the same boat as you and have spent the last 9 months trying to find out as much information on the subject as I can. I think that we all have to bear in mind that when Google imposes a penalty it is the equivalent of a jail sentence for our sites. Only once we have served the sentence will a reinclusion request be considered. However, I also think that the penalty's are too harsh as they condemn good sites who have made one mistake to the scrap heap. All I do now is keep building my site with the best quality unique content with the aim of making the site the best in its category. Other search engines think my site is great, so it's Googles loss.
Google needs a better appeal process.
they condemn good sites who have made one mistake to the scrap heap
Or in some cases sites that haven't made any mistakes at all or none that I can find, anyway!
* Send the reinclusion request via the form at google.com/support/
* Note "reinclusion request" in subject line
* List all pages that no longer appear and beg to have them put back in index.
* Consider adding a google sitemap - my personal thinking is that part of the reason for that new feature is to expedite the reinclusion process.
Also watch for Googleguy posting a special address for Bourbon comments - he said he was going to do that soon.
Listen to Panacea and read _Google Information for Webmasters_ at [google.co.uk...]
It clearly states:
Each time we update our database of web pages (about once a month), our index shifts: we find new sites, we lose some sites, and site rankings change. If your site was dropped from Google and you have not made major changes to it in the last month, we will likely pick it up again in our next index. It's possible your site was simply inaccessible when our robots tried to crawl it.
Unfortunately, the reality is even worse than this admission.
I'm waiting on one right now. Unfortunately I can only guess at the reason why my site received a penalty (possibly duplicate content).
I want to know if Google will accept calls from webmasters wanting to check the progress of their reinclusion request? I'd be more than happy to pay for an international long-distance call for some peace of mind.
I have learned through my experiences that you should never rely of one domain address only. Be ready to move your site to a new domain at any time. Your high ranking and money making site can loose all Google traffic in one night for reasons you will never know.
Let's see how long it takes Google to respond with an answer!
Excellent summary - that is my impression as well of how the support notes will say "you have no penalty" when you've been killed by filtering of results which will NOT be adjusted manually. I believe G when they say they do not manually adjust results except in extreme cases. If they did there'd be a lot less spam and fewer good site casualities. I think the problem at Google is that they have become religious about the algorithm, trusting it more than human intervention which is now needed desparately for the big money sectors if they want to preserve their place in search.
>> If my website got way trashed by Bourbon
I think re-inclusion is only if the site is no longer indexed. Being on page 45736 is no reason to send one, they will be ignored (from my experience). Now if GoogleGuy asks people to send their trashed sites once Bourbon is done, that's a different story.
>> I think re-inclusion is only if the site is no longer indexed. Being on page 45736 is no reason to send one, they will be ignored (from my experience). Now if GoogleGuy asks people to send their trashed sites once Bourbon is done, that's a different story.<<
What is the difference between being in position 45736, or being stuck in the supplemental index?
What do you think the definition of “trashed’ is?
technically it's the same. Even being #100 is the same as far as money goes; you make nothing. All I know (from my exp) is that if your site is indexed, google will send you the default: you have no penalty, serps change, all is automated etc. etc. I guess being supplemental is different, maybe they'll look at it since maybe you've been "hijacked"...
For those of us at position 45736 and G says 'you have no penalty' that means they have not manually assigned a penalty.
So there are automatic algorithmic penalties that effectively do the same thing as hand removal, Right?
And I guess it is true that most of us think the automatic penalties are often based on some form of duplicate content?
And, there are 3 things we can do;
1) do nothing and hope the algo changes
2) attempt to guess and fix what might be wrong and wait for another major update (3 months?)
3) switch to a new domain and hope you shake lose all the 302's (if that's what was causing the problem)?
Question for you webmaster experts... If I put NOINDEX tag on pages with little content will that definitely take them out of G's equation?
To your bottom line there is no difference in being on page 46,539 or not being in Google's index at all, but there is a difference to Google. The site that is on page 46,539 is listed in Google's index and some SERP work will bring it closer to the top (can't go too much further down). It does not need to be submitted for reinclusion, but perhaps there is a reson it's ranked so low that is maybe unjust - and hopefully Google will include it later.
A site that was once in Google's index and is no longer there has been removed and needs to be added back in (reinclusion).
I am currently working on a site that has been removed from Google - oh the fun!
Tom
I submitted the support form, don't think I even used the term reinclusion, just told them about the situations and about how I suspect the previous owner may have played it wrong, but it wasn't my fault and I could not change that. They responded with the generic "we understand your concern and will forward this to our engineers". It took five weeks or so but the site was unbanned and even got it's PR5 on the next PR update :)
I have recently purchased an expired domain. Didn't have any backlinks as far as I could tell and I bought it because I liked its sound. There's not a whole lot of content on the site, but I have been building links to it for quite a while and it's still not indexed. I dropped Google a word about it a couple of weeks ago, and got the same reply. I'm waiting patiently now. :)
Really Google, what is the point in this service if you send generic replies to people who have neither cloaked, purchased links or have any hidden text.
What is the point when GoogleGuy suggestions writing in, but all you get is a reply which is totally irrelevant?
I find it deeply frustrating.
