Reconsideration Request Tips - from Google Search Quality Team

[nealrodriguez]

Tips on requesting reconsideration [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

Do you think your site might be penalized because of something that
happened on it? As two leaders of the reconsideration team, we recently made
a video to help you discover how to create a good reconsideration request,
including tips on what we look for on our side.

[tedster]

The video is offered by two team members (new Google faces online) - two people who actually read the Reconsideration Requests. If anything, the point here seems to be "Your requests WILL be read and investigated, so please play it straight and be concise, but be informative."

[nealrodriguez]

"Your requests WILL be read and investigated,

dragged and trashed, and if printed, shredded ;)

please play it straight and be concise, but be informative."

document what you have done to correct any violations;

and only file a new reconsideration request if you have new information about your site.

[tedster]

One of the key points in this video is to keep the actual request concise. If you have a lot of details to share (url lists for example) then post those details on a webpage and include that url in the request. But don't paste a huge amount of text into the actual request form.

In my view, this is respectful of the employees who read through all the input as well as a good way to make your communication in a persuasive and well organized fashion.

[arizonadude]

That's a great video of you actually did something wrong. If you know you didn't and none of what they say to look for applies and your just one of the unfortunate to get caught up in the imperfect filters as so many do, what are you supposed to do, make something up?

[tedster]

Start by assuming that the filter caught something or other real about your site and then look for what that might be. This doesn't mean you intentionally tried to game Google - it might well be something you did where you weren't aware of the repurcussions. False positives do happen, but in my experience they are not all that common. It's much more common that there is something real triggering the ranking problem.

At any rate, if you find one or more potential issues, make related changes, and then submit a reconsideration request you are showing a good faith effort - doing your due diligence.

If you are certain that your site is 100% an innocent victim, you can always tke the topic to Google's Webmaster Help forums - as long as you are willing to post your domain for public inspection. Poke arouond on that forum and you will see that most of the time "innocent victims" end up learning about something that actually IS wrong. In a few cases, I have seen the Google reps comment that there was an error and then it does get fixed on Google's back end.

[arizonadude]

Would you do a request for a so called -50 penalty? I have a feeling I may have been a bit agressive on the internal linking. Would not removing what I think is the problem be enough for the filter to be lifted once it's respidered?