How do reconsideration requests work at Google?

Please walk us through the reconsideration request process from Google's perspective. Has anything about the reconsideration process changed recently?
Matt Cutts, Bay Area, California

For more reasons why your site may not be showing up well in Google, read the "My site isn't doing well in search" article in our Help Center: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34444

Read more about changes to the reconsideration request process on our blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/reconsideration-requests-g...

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Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• seo
• reconsideration
• spam

[jeffyablon]

"sometimes you've seen that your site isn't showing up in search results"? Umm ... isn't checking your results against the rules to begin with?

[GoogleWebmasterHelp]

@jeffyablon sending automated queries (which may include queries to check rankings) to Google without our permission violates our Terms of Service. If it's just you doing a search manually as a human, that should be fine. You can also get data about your search rankings in Webmaster Tools.

[BinaryStar101]

Hey, what if some one really don't know what is the real issue with their site..??

[JLMarylou752]

:)yeppp

[8cJoann585]

good

[DVDizzydotcom]

It is unconscionable that you know the violations and choose not to share them with penalized webmasters. Say you run a popular site with thousands of individually-coded articles that ranked highly for just over ten years. Then, one day out of the blue, you are hit with a utterly perplexing page 5/6/7 penalty. Take a harder look at the site?! Those who deliberately spam can recover. But a site that clearly isn't spamming and has tons of the unique quality content you encourage is out of luck?

[panthary]

@GoogleWebmasterHelp

Having my website penalized would have to be one of the most stressful things in the world. I think you should hire more staff at the webspam team, so that reconsideration requests can be processed a heck of a lot faster.

[gosolarTV]

Time for my first comment … I regular watch the GoogleWebmasterHelp and really appreciated the explanations by Matt Cutts. But I have to say that this video was actually a better visual experience beside the great informations. Thanks a lot … hope to see your team more often ;-)

[alejandromoleiro]

I have had 403 errors during 12 hours because Hostgator cancelled my sites due to the huge traffic I used to have in the shared hosting. 12 hours were the time I have expended to move all the contents to the new server. But then you have penalized me. I really don't know what happened and what you supposed I have done. Since 13rd July 2011 I have been penalized and I still don't know why and how can solve it

[jeffyablon]

@GoogleWebmasterHelp I'm genuinely gratified to have received a response, so thank you. And what you state does in fact match your "official" published position. But let's face facts, shall we? The results from Analytics often don't feel "right", and people looking to check beyond page 1 (OK, maybe 2 or 3) have no practical way to do so, other than using tools that would have to be viewed as "automated". Practically speaking, disallowed tools are required to do "checking".

I'll concur that

[youradrenalinefixllc]

@Jeffyablon This concerns me. If checking your placements in the SERP's is against the rules I would like to know so as well. If a Google employee could chime in on this I'd very very appreciative because I check my SERP positions constantly and daily.

I don't think this is against any guidelines but since you brought it up it has me concerned.