This post is a follow up to is my website banned in Google. Looking at the screen shot below you can see I’m no longer banned.
Ok so you want to know exactly what happened and what I did. First a little more background data it turns out my hosting company was hacked and suffered some data loss. After I discovered this I submitted a re-inclusion request. A few days later I saw someone come with a Google referrer and visit three pages more about this later. Proving that they were complete dunderheads my hosting company was hacked yet again. At this point I decided it was time to put an end to the misery and changed hosts. To get the most out of my downtime and expedite the process I submitted a second re-inclusion mentioning the hacking and pointed them to page the host set up giving some details. Last sunday I had 16 pages in the supplemental index. Being in the supplemental index is not a good thing, but it is a step up from being kicked out of the index.
So I returned from Pubcon and on Saturday I noticed I was getting referrals. I checked and I had 150 or so pages in the index. The most important or most recent pages are not in the index but I’m clearly happy I’m moving in the right direction.
Ok so what about the Google referral that happened after the re-inclusion, well they visited exactly 4 pages. The three pages that were the “worst pages” on the site. What was the offense Predictive SEO. Basically I set up some placeholder pages for an event that going to happen before the end of January 2007. Yes it will happen there is no doubt but the pages said nothing more than “blah blah blah this event hasn’t happened yet please check back soon”. So after that visit I decided to beef up those pages a bit with a bit more unique content. One could speculate that pages within a site are rated for “quality” and a re-inclusion request will be accompanied by the reviewer visiting the “biggest offender”, however that’s purely speculation. One could also speculate that a re-inclusion request from inside of the webmaster central control panel get “more weight” since Matt Cutts confirmed that spam requests do, but again still speculation.
From where I stand sitemaps was instrumental in getting this problem solved. At the very least it helped me understand some of what Google was doing or thinking about the website. At the most it helped expedite the entire process and helped me get the site back in place when it was coming into it’s peak money making season.
Matt Cutts has some tips on how to file a File a reinclusion request
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{ 5 comments }
Google is very forgiving.
It’s true that if you want to do a reinclusion request, the best place to do it is in the webmaster console. Look for the “Tools” box in the top right-hand corner, and expand that box to see a reinclusion request form and a spam reporting form.
…happy for you – but I still think that actively advertising black hat seo cloaking sites etc on your blog is… well… none of my businesss I guess
>Laura those ads a clearly labeled and Javascript so the people buying them are buying them for traffic not for link pop.
Glad to hear that things worked out! My site xtort.net is still not back in the index either after being dropped this month. I am starting to think that our host may have been hacked or something also. I did a reinclusion request just in case someone maliciously filed an exclusion request. I wish there was a way to know for sure the cause of such things.
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