Getting Back Into Google’s Good Graces

A lot of businesses have struggled with search, and sometimes make mistakes that pretty much render them invisible in the search engine or tossed out altogether. For example, buying links might not sound so bad if you’re not familiar with the ways of search, but it’s a huge no no if you want people to find you through search engines. It’s against the rules or "quality guidelines".

Whatever reason you’re not showing up in Google, you do have the ability to submit to Google a reconsideration request. Google, in fact, just announced that it is being more transparent about how it handles these. Tiffany Oberoi and Michael Wyszomierski of Google’s Search Quality Team put up a joint post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog expelling this. Here’s an excerpt:

If your site isn’t appearing in Google search results, or it’s performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our Webmaster Guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site. Over time, we’ve worked to improve the reconsideration process for webmasters. A couple of years ago, in addition to confirming that we had received the request, we started sending a second message to webmasters confirming that we had processed their request. This was a huge step for webmasters who were anxiously awaiting results. Since then, we’ve received feedback that webmasters wanted to know the outcome of their requests. Earlier this year, we started experimenting with sending more detailed reconsideration request responses and the feedback we’ve gotten has been very positive!

Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request. Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.

If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well. Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it,

Google also recommends reading its article about why a site may not be showing up in Google search results in the help center. Here, Google instructs users to 

- Check your site is in the Google Index

- Make sure Google can find and crawl your site

- Make sure that Google can index your site

- Make sure your content is useful and relevant. 

There are details about how to go about each of these in the article. There is also a video about why your site may not be performing well in search results and how to get it reconsidered. 

Google’s Matt Cutts also put out a new video talking about reasons you may have lost PageRank, that is certainly worth watching. More on that here.