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Google Reinclusion Requests

Even if you don't intentionally violate Google's terms of service, you may still get excluded from Google's index. Since Google is the largest search engine, being banned from thier index can be very harmful to your buisness and online reputation.

If you believe that your site is not present in the Google Index, you must first verify that it is not just a penalty and that you are truly banned.

You can verify this by running the "site:" command in Google. to run the command, you simply type

site:www.yourdomainname.com

Be sure there are no spaces between the colon and www. and use your domain name.

If Google returns results for you domain then you have not been banned but are suffering a penalty. If no results are found, you have been truly banned.

The fact your site is missing from Google's index can mean a few things.

1. Your site is new. If your site is new you are probably suffering from the Google Sand Box effect. It is quite normal for new sites to have a lag of a few days to a month (sometimes more) before it is included in the Google Index. You simply need to be patient and wait. If traffic is a must at this point, try a pay per click campaign.

2. You may have either intentionally or otherwise done something that violates Google's terms. This list of violations is rather exhaustive and Google does not give you warning or notify you of what you did wrong.

Why Does Google Exclude Sites?

Google could exclude your site(s) for many reasons. For instance, your sites are over-optimized and this makes them very suspicious. Over-optimization can look highly suspicious to Google, so view the Over Optimization article here to get some ideas of practices that you should avoid.

Some of the other reasons for being excluded from Google are Search Engine spamming, hidden text, hosting illegal content, linking to bad neighbors, inter-linking, etc. Any SEO manipulation or tactic in an attempt to mislead search engines is reason to get you banned.

Remember if it smells bad, it probably is. Stay away from "tricks"

After you discover that you have been excluded from Google, the first step is to analyze why. You need to know what made them angry with you and correct your mistakes. If you don't optimize your website yourself but hired an outside SEO company, it is likely that they did something in an effort to manipulate the search engines. Check for links to link farms and bad neighbors, for doorway pages and keyword stuffing.

After you have fixed all the issues that may have caused the ban you have to contact Google with a reinclusion request. Go to Google Sitemaps and from the Tools menu on the right, select Submit a Reinclusion Request. On the next screen, read the instructions and explanations carefully and fill in the required data and submit the form.

After you submit your inclusion request, there is nothing more you can do than fix your errors (if you have not already done it) and wait patiently for the answer.

Though the process of submitting a reinclusion request is pretty straightforward, there is some general advice, which can help you. The following tips can improve your chances of success.

• Admit your errors and fix them
  This has already been said but it is a big mistake to write to Google and play innocent. You can lie to yourself but this way you will not convince them that you are a martyr who has been suffering because of their cruelty. And above all - fix your mistakes before you submit the reinclusion request. It is a very stupid situation to have your errors unfixed and wait for reinclusion because you will simply never get reincluded this way. What is more, you are undermining your chances for success in the future as well.

• Be polite.
  The worst mistake you can make in your reinclusion request is to be rude. Threatening Google with lawsuits or hinting that you might boycott their AdWords program in revenge for being excluded from their index is a deadly mistake. Anyway, Google are not obliged to provide you with free traffic, so being included in their index is not a special privilege they had granted you for your AdWords money.

• Look at their Webmasters Guidelines.
  It is unlikely that they have changed them recently and you do not comply with them anymore but it does not hurt to double check that you have done what Google recommends to do.

• Don't spam them.
  Google receives heaps of e-mails and it is not possible to answer each incoming e-mail an hour or so after it had been submitted. Bombarding Google with tons of e-mails (even polite ones) could only make your situation worse.

• Is it your first time?
  Google may not keep statistics of its recidivists but if it just happens that your site gets bans several times a year, this gets very suspicious. If you are banned for the first time, you can account on amnesty. But if you have been banned many times, you can be out of luck with reinclusion requests about the same site.

• Reaasure them that it is not going to happen again.
  This is also very important because if Google get the impression that you violate their rules very often, they might be reluctant to reinclude you. In some cases, when it was not your personal fault - e.g. webmaster you hired sent many spam letters or your site got hacked, you can explain what happened, giving a detailed timeframe of the events.