How to do a reinclusion request?

Might as well have this in an easily findable place

[Janiss]

I keep seeing mentions of reinclusion requests, but not a lot of specifics about if, when and how to do them. Plus, since it's usually mentioned in the Bourbon thread, the mentions get lost in a sea of posts. So can those in the know answer these questions:

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! :-)

[queritor]

"I think within a month, assuming and hoping the better, I would be alcoholic or heoine addicted."

I hear ya! :(

[errorsamac]

My site was banned June 12th and I received a reply in late June (I don't have the exact date in front of me) that they would fwd the re-inclusion request to their engineers. I looked through my Apache logs and it looks like someone from Google (engineer?) did visit me on July 6th, but my site is still not in the Google index. So right now I am coming up on 2 months banned and almost 1 month since they said they fwd it to the Google engineers to review.

Once/If I make it back into the index, I'll post an update.

[JuniorOptimizer]

Well that is encouraging. 2 months without traffic and no reponse!

[webbyfro]

From what I can gather from reading various threads is that once they send your request to their engineers, you go into a list of people waiting to have their site/request looked at by an actual human being. As the Net is massive, one/two months isn't that long to wait, really.

As for myself, Googlebot continues to visit the server, but it doesn't spider anything beyond the sitemap. Once it starts to spider, I'll know I've been unbanned. Fingers crossed that it's soon.

[errorsamac]

webbyfro - When was your site banned?

And to clarify, I believe my site was checked by a real person on July 6th. So I'm not sure if they decided to just not unban it, or if they did remove the ban and it's just waiting for the next quarterly Google update?

[moftary]

So I'm not sure if they decided to just not unban it, or if they did remove the ban and it's just waiting for the next quarterly Google update?

If they unbanned your website, it should show in serps immediately. There is no update involved here.

[cmarket]

Just jumping in as I have a site in a similar predicament.

Was ranking well for numerous searches then all of a sudden (over the new year..) vanished.

The homepage hasn't been cached for 6 months, internal pages have but they change around regularly. The homepage maintained PR5 through all this but in light of recent changes, the homepage is now not only not cahced but down to PR0. But with more backlinks....

I'm gonna read more previous threads but any pointers from any knowledgeable folk would be handy!

[webbyfro]

Yes, as I've read, if they unban you, the results is almost immediate. You should show up in the SERPS almost immediately because basically all they're doing, from what I can gather, is simply removing your URL from their ban list, and that allows your site to list, whereas when you were banned, all of your URLs were kept from appearing in the SERPS.

[eyeinthesky]

Er ... what's the email address to send to for a re-inclusion request?

Tried sending to [e-mail] but got the standard reply - use their online form. As usual, no reply, nothing.

[webbyfro]

If they don't reply to your request via the form after a week, send another one, and this time try to explain yourself better, or word it differently. If they don't respond with anything besides a canned response, it probably means they didn't "pass it on to the engineers" and dismissed your letter. I'm just guessing here, of course, but it did take me two forms to finally get a response. And I'm sure I spent more time on the second explanation, going really in depth, with proof, etc.

[errorsamac]

I had success (getting a personalized response) by filling out the form located at www.google.com/support.

Thanks to everyone for clarifying that domains should be in the index shortly after being reviewed by a human. In my case, I am in the process of re-writing the entire website anyway, so I'm going to email Google again within a week and asking them to re-review the site since it will be completely different (content is the same, but urls, scripts, html all different).

[moftary]

What was the personalized reply? Have they informed you of issues breaking their TOS?

[errorsamac]

The first personalized response to me mentioned that some sites fall out of the index for a variety of reasons, etc. I replied to that and gave a detailed outline of why I think my site was removed from the Google index and what I did to resolve the problems. I then received another reply about a week later saying they would fwd it to engineers to review. Engineers reviewed the site and it was declined (I assume), so I'm in a holding pattern right now until I can get a new site online. I am basing the rejection off of the assumption that something is wrong with my html or php scripts, so everything is getting re-written completely to try to solve whatever problem I have. If that still doesn't work, I will just do straight HTML eliminate all php scripts.

[moftary]

Oh so your success is receiving a personal reply from G? Very encouraging really!:)
I dont think it's a matter of php scripts or any server side issues, but good luck anyway.

[webbyfro]

I think one should be prepared to give them a month after they pass your case off to their engineers. After that, it should be okay to email them again. It's only been a week for me.

[errorsamac]

moftary - I don't think it's the html or php either, but I just happen to be rewriting the site when the old site was banned, so I figure that's a convenient time to ask to be re-reviewed (once the new site is launched). I think the problem might have to do with using meta-refreshes on the site. I have them blocked from Googlebot via robots.txt, but when the engineer was reviewing my site, one of the places they went gave them a meta-refresh and they did not look in my robots.txt file.

webbyfro - Do you have access to your web server logs? If you do, keep an eye out for Google (not Googlebot) reviewing your site. It was less than a week from when I received a reply saying they would fwd to engineers that they reviewed it. Let us know if you have any luck getting back in.

[Ian Cunningham]

How do you know if google have visited? Do they use a certain IP range?

[JuniorOptimizer]

Dear Google,

It is I, your humble servant, -------. I was looking through your index and by Google I can no longer find my site. Google, why have thou forsaken me? I prostrate myself at all signs of your mightiness and I beg you with all the energy I can muster, alloweth me back in thine superior search engine.

Sincerly,

Your subject,
A webmaster

Something like this should work very well :)

[moftary]

"Dont blasphemed you ***, google has nothing to do with this!" --Reverend John, 21 Grams.

[edited by: eelixduppy at 9:56 pm (utc) on Feb. 18, 2009]

[webbyfro]

Good news!

Just discovered a few minutes ago that I am back in the index! My pages have yet to filter into the SERPs, but the homepage is already showing, complete with full descriptions, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Googlebot starts doing some heavy spidering of the site and filter my pages into the SERPs. Looks like this just happened today (probably after midnight), so I'll update everyone about what happens later today.

And the answer to most people's questions:

Google replied to my request on 7/27.
I'm back in the index on 8/3.

A total of 8 days! Not bad

[Rx Recruiters]

Webbyfro - By getting a reply on July 27th, I assume you had asked for reinclusion sometime earlier?

So I guess you weren't one of the sites caught in the July 28th deletions, but sometime before then?

[webbyfro]

>>So I guess you weren't one of the sites caught in the July 28th deletions, but sometime before then? <<

That's correct, about two months prior. It never occurred to me that I was banned, or the reasons why, until about two weeks ago.

[moftary]

On the countrary here, still banned and even worth...

Although being banned, my site pages remained in google DCs (showing result 1-4 from 250.000), Now it appears that google is wiping out banned sites completely (showing results 1-4 from 10.000).

Figures were for example purpose only.

[danimal]

last month i lost all google search engine traffic on a couple of my websites, the only thing i get is google image searches... both sites are still in the google index, one of 'em was a page one site for years, fully legit, only 6 or so pages total.

thanks to all for the tip to use the google support page email, this problem is costing both google and myself $$$ in lost adsense earnings.

i just don't understand why google would hurt itself like this.

[webbyfro]

>>i just don't understand why google would hurt itself like this. <<

Probably because it isn't hurting Google any. You're just one publisher out of millions.

[errorsamac]

webbyfro - Congrats on getting back into the index! Last night I decided to re-submit my request to be reviewed by Google rather than wait until I roll out a redesigned site. Hopefully I'll get a response shortly.

[webbyfro]

Yeah, if your redesign won't take more than 2/3 weeks, it's best to submit your re-inclusion request now. It takes them a week just to reply, then another week to work out your problem. So you basically have 2/3 weeks of nothing happening, and that's IF they decide to take a look at unbanning you.

[errorsamac]

Like I said in my earlier post, I emailed Google and ask to be reviewed a second time. Google just replied and reassured me that they sent the request to their engineering team. The way it was worded, I'm not sure if they re-fwd the request, or are just confirming they did send it originally. Anyone know if you can have a site reviewed by the engineering team multiple times, or is it that once it is reviewed the first time, that's the final decision?

[sundaro]

I was also showing up in the Google index until 8/7. Now I have been completely dropped.

I am a novice when it comes to SEO but I thought I was following the guidelines. The only thing I thought might have hurt me was that I signed up with a company called Links4Trade to find link partners. Is anyone familiar with this service and could this be why I was penalized by Google?

Thanks,

Sundaro

[errorsamac]

Update - My site is back on Google! The homepage is back to PR4 although all of the links off of that are still PR0. Also, for some reason the search results for my domain are very stale. Hopefully this will correct itself over time.

For those keeping track:

6/12 - Banned
6/27 - Fwd to engineering team
7/6 - Reviewed by engineering team
8/11 - Back into the index.