Re-inclusion timeline - one site's experience

Getting back in after THE email from Google

[chinkchink]

I am one of those thousands who get the Google email about the 30-days out-of-index penalty. Just want to share the timeline of re-inclusion I experienced for others to reference:

1/4/2006 - Got email from Google about the hidden text on our website. Home page PR 5, interior pages PR 2-4, over 700 pages indexed. Googlebot visited daily. On some weekends, Googlebot request count was between 200-300.

1/8/2006 - website disappeared in SERP, PR drop to 0 for the entire site. Search with "site:www.mysite.com" returned 0 match.

1/9/2006 - removed all hidden text in question.

1/10/2006 - Submitted re-inclusion request.

1/9 - 2/7 - Googlebot visited about 2-4 times a day during this period. No email or other communication from/to Google.

2/8/2006, noon - exactly 30 days after our site disappeared from SERP. Home page PR back to 5. Log file from 0:00AM to 12:00PM shows 22 visits from Googlebot.
Back in SERP for most of our keywords but over all ranking dropped about 2-10 slots (this is natural without the hidden text).

Happy to get back in and hope this timeline help those who are still waiting.

[crobb305]

For BMW.de it was 3 days.

C

[frox]

chinkchink, interesting timelime. Not that (crossing fingers) I need that :-)

For BMW.de it was 3 days

Well, they have one order of magnitude less here. I guess it's fair, as they have several orders of magnitude more elsewhere :-(

[Powdork]

Thanks for that. i have a question. Is the re-inclusion request a winn win thing. I have just taken over for a site that has been offline for quite a while, at least several weeks. I don't know if they are banned from Google or if G just doesn't know they exist. I am planning on uploading the new site soon, although I just opened the cd with the files. The first thing that popped out at me was all the hidden text. I am tempted to file a reinclusion request just because they should have been banned whether or not they were. I'm worried that somehow it could hurt them if they weren't banned, but I doubt it. After all, there is nowhere to go but up.
Is there a downside to filing the request if you weren't actually banned?

[frox]

Powdork, try searching your domain ( like www.domain.com) in Google.

That will tell if it's in need ot re-inclusion: if the message is something like "Google doesn't know about www.domain.com" then the site is banned.

[textex]

My experience is the opposit.
I have a site that has been banned for several months. Site is squeaky clean.

All possible shady outbound links have been removed.

No other possible issues that would cause a ban.

Asked for re-inclusion.

Go a canned repsonse telling us to check the FAQ for webmasters and to only responde to the email if our questions were not answered.

I responded. Several times. Never got another response.

[mzconstruction]

My experience is the opposite.
I have a site that has been banned for several months. Site is squeaky clean.

Go a canned repsonse telling us to check the FAQ for webmasters and to only respond to the email if our questions were not answered.

I responded. Several times. Never got another response.

Snap. We were de-listed after four years. Our response is very simple. As of today we've banned googlebot from our site. We're not commercial and we can make up the traffic we've lost elsewhere. As far as I'm concerned Google are no longer the organisation they were four years ago. Our site is devoted to free speech and political and social satire and we're pretty sure that we've fallen foul of Google's censorship rules. You know, the ones they deny having...
;-)

Stuff them!

[tedster]

I'd like to see the thread stay on topic -- sites that have or have not been able to get reinluded after getting the warning email.

Note that the opening poster did not just discover that the site was dropped -- they got one of those new, experimental emails notifying them that Google intended to take the action. See [webmasterworld.com...] for more information.

The program is relatively new and not every site dropped gets this friendly warning. This thread gives clear testimony that hope for reinclusion may be brighter when your site is part of the experimental warning program.

Thanks to chinkchink for the report.

[rkhare]

As far as I'm concerned Google are no longer the organisation they were four years ago

true, even though i agree with you and have shifted to yahoo/msn for searches but still its the most used SE. and as webmaster we just cant ignore its power to bring traffic to us

[mzconstruction]

The program is relatively new and not every site dropped gets this friendly warning.

Is there any **HARD** evidence from Google that this progranmme actually exists? I read the linked thread and it seemed to me that there was some doubt about the email warnings authenticity. Please forgive me if I am being overly cynical.

[chinkchink]

[mattcutts.com...]
not sure if this is consider HARD evidence...

but I ensure everyone who is in doubt that all events stated in my original posting actually happened to my site.

Also I would like to add that the first time I submitted the re-inclusion request, I did not follow the instruction on Google's email and created my own subject line... for that, I also recieve a canned response (as textex described in msg:#6) from Google.

After that I submited another request following Google's instruction:
"...and then make sure to type “Reinclusion Request” in the Subject....."

May be only those requests submitted with the specific Subject get forwarded to the right person? not sure....