nts on individual cases. It won't tell you exactly why your site was banned. I guess this is for reasons of time, and to give no clues to spammers.
In my case the ban was justified for my two satellite sites, while not looking like
spam, they were effectively doorway sites.
My main site was different. It had offending pages, but was mostly a diverse labour of seven years, a personal site on steroids.
Google bans sites algorithmically: a site that fits their 'spammer' profile gets dropped via software from their index automatically. Real spammers shrug their shoulders and move on, honest webmasters write emails begging for mercy.
Like me.
I did some searching via Google, to find out how to do a re-inclusion request. Here's how:
1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to
google.com, typing 'site:
yourdomain.com' without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages at all ...
2. You check Google's webmaster guidelines at
google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not really guidelines, you should treat them as iron-clad rules.
3. You stop the offending content from being web-accessible, permanently.
If you're familiar with Apache web-server modrewrite you can:
- Send a 410 'Gone' response to requests for the offending pages, or
- CHMOD them to 600, which will return a 403 'Forbidden' response, or
- Move them to a different directory if you need to keep them, or
- Just delete them.
Don't try to be clever. Just get rid of them.
4. You go to
google.com/support/bin/request.py, tick the relevant boxes, and type 'Re-inclusion request' in the subject box of the form.
4a. You add th.complete URL of your site i.e.
naughtydomain.com,
4b. You state that you have read the webmaster guidelines above,
4c. You admit what you did wrong, simply, succinctly, with no carping or special pleading.
Don't try to be clever. Don't argue. Don't lie. Don't waffle.
Google has cached copies of your site. When an engineer checks your
site, he'll look for the offending content, an.compare it against
their cache. He'll spend about two minutes on it, don't give him a reason to continue to exclude you.
5. You ask for re-inclusion.
6. You wait.
In my case, it took about a week, a long, unpleasant, fretful week. I sent follow up emails saying what I was doing, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that didn't work. That was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that's all that should be necessary.
They emailed a standard reply saying "the problem had been passed to their engineers". That's good. I understand they send no reply to spammers.
A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To make sure I'm not so vulnerable again, I'm splitting my content to different sites, on the principle of 'best not to have all your eggs in one basket'.
Have I learnt anything from this? Yes. Have more than one site as your 'money-maker'. Spend less time on search engine optimisation and more on traditional marketing.come up with a unique selling proposition tha.compels people to link to your site. Easy(!)
= A site specifically set up to host Google Adsense advertisements (
google.com/adsense). Usually of low quality, consisting of pages of links to other web sites, text copied from free-print articles, and a big Google ad block 'above the fold'.
Search Engine Result Pages
Doorway pages are low-quality keyword-rich web pages whose sole purpose is to lead the viewer to the 'real' content, usually whatever the site is selling.
About the author: T. O' Donnell
ttblog.co.uk is an ecommerce consultant and curmudgeon living in London, UK. His latest project is an ebook on getting a loan in the UK, available at
tigertom.com/secured-loans-uk.shtml.
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