Video: Reinclusion requests

Okay, here’s a new video. This is pretty much just a short update to my reinclusion request howto post to mention that our Google Webmaster Tools (formerly known as Sitemaps) has a web form for reinclusion requests. In the video, you get to see my other cat Emmy for the first time–that’s why my voice is softer and the lights are darker. Even though the video is informal (I had just finished playing hockey at the Googleplex), I still wanted to make sure everyone knew about the web form. It’s been there for quite a while, but I figured that it never hurts to remind people about it.

Session 11: Reinclusion requests

Matt and Emmy answer Google Questions:
– How do I do a reinclusion request?
– What should I put into a reinclusion request?
– What does Google need to know before it reincludes a site in its index?

Two trivia tidbits: 1) you can see my brain spin a little because I recorded this last Thursday, and I knew that on Friday, the Sitemaps team was rebranding to Google Webmaster Tools, so I wasn’t sure what to call it: Sitemaps or Google Webmaster Tools. 2) In about the middle of this video, right after mooning the camera, Emmy gets interested in something off-screen and jumps down. She was actually seeing herself on an LCD screen, so she wanted to go check out that other cat.

34 Responses to Video: Reinclusion requests (Leave a comment)

  1. Matt, you have a very cool cat. This was the best video so far.

    Maybe Emmy should take over your broadcasts.

  2. Emmy, speacial guest 😉
    Thanks Matt, an other video that my crew have to translate… 😉

  3. Matt –

    Thanks for the great info as always. One of the more interesting points I think you brought up was how you mentioned how you should express to Google about having identified the problem and giving some type of reassurance that it would not happen again. Seems that same mindset might prove useful when talking to the AdWords or AdSense teams.

    – Hagrin

    PS – I think you opened the door for quite a lot of cat jokes today – should be interesting!

  4. One question I see quite often: what if you do not know what the problem is, your site was deindexed (or never indexed)? Do you file a reinclusion request and “admit” you did this and that (choose randomly) and promise to never do it again? Or do you plan on adding an option “I have no idea what is wrong, please tell me if I should correct anything, I’ll do it, I want to be a clean webmaster”? I think this is a very, very important item.

    Seriously, I could care less if a spammer cleaned up his doorway redirect cloaking – it’s the normal webmaster who wants to be indexed, wants to run a clean, search-engine friendly site and has no idea what is wrong that I’m worried about. The pros who know what they did was wrong will slap together another site (just borderline enough to get indexed) in a weekend.

    Also, could you give us some feedback on the general state of reinclusions? Are the processed and how? What kind of timeframe should we figure? Do we get an answer if there is nothing to “reinclude” (eg no penalty)? Do automated penalties count? What about reduced crawler priorities based on on-site content (eg get the crawler speed back up so that they can spot that we removed the non-Adsense monetization)?

    Thanks.

  5. Tips and cat butt in the same clip!

    I have a question that is somewhat realated to this clip.
    What happens if I discover a site that is blatantly breaking the rules and as such is getting a page 1 spot in Google’s results pages?
    I know of at least one competitor of mine that makes use of a huge amount of hidden, spammed text to influence his ranking position. This has been reported to Google via the spam report form but that was quite some time ago.
    Whilst I appreciate Google must get thousands of spam reports can you give us an idea of how long it takes for action to be taken?
    I can supply the URL of the site in question if you’d like to see how blatant the spamming is.

    Many thanks

  6. I should have added…

    Is there anything else one can do to report keyword spamming, hidden text etc?

  7. You were stroking your cat in very Dr Evil-like fashion, Matt. I was figuring the new reinclusion policy required a payment of 100 billion dollars. (*Pinky to corner of mouth*)

    I was pleasantly surprised. Great video. Thanks.

  8. Matt,

    Wat is the time, in general, between a reinclusion request and reappearance of the website in Google?
    How do you know if a request was not successful?

    Theo

  9. Matt,
    First, I love the videos. There is great info in them.

    Here is my question:
    Why does it say “gay porn” next to the browse section for the following video?
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1156145545372854697

    Justin

  10. If a site is reincluded (if that’s a word), does it “start from scratch” and Google will treat it as if nothing happened before? Or does it carry a penalization from previous? And what about the existing back-links? Does that count for something as well?

    Thanks.
    –Paul.

  11. TomHTML, Heres the latest english translation – ReInclusion Requests”;

    Should be easier to translate for you

    I will get to work on the newer video as soon as possible

    All videos will appear at http://www.viperchill.com/matt-cutts/ thumb

  12. Matt can you edit that last post please

    Forget to add the “” haha

  13. Matt Hi,

    Taken from your reinclusion request howto post – ” It doesn’t hurt your site to do a reinclusion request if you’re not sure what’s wrong or if you’ve checked carefully and can’t find anything wrong.”

    So I went ahead and looked at the reinclusion request since my site took a nose dive in serps only to see that in order to send it you have to admit that your site was involved in the past in spam activity.

    What if I believe 100% that my site was not involved in any spam and still want to send a reinclusion request?

  14. To Asher and JonhMu…

    God help us… I’ve submitted a reinclusion report 2 months ago and nothing changed… Told google support that we’ve lost our investment because other sites seem to steal our traffic… And guess what?

    “There is ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to hurt your rankings”…

    There you have it… That’s what they are going to say. Not a single word about how to combat sites which hit you with 302 redirects (something which I am very close to hold evidence that it affects google)

    Nothing about those pages which copy a paragraph from other sites and then they rank higher for your “companyname”, and of course nothing about how to know if you are hit.

    Matt, I am not going personally against you or anyone in Google… But a lot of genuine people with genuine websites which have cost a fortune to build are simply gone from the SERPs, and Google couldn’t care less about our site(s). And why should they at the end of the day?

    However, since Vanessa and Matt have genuinely proved they want to open webmaster communication channels (check the relevant thread on WW) and I do reckognise this.

    Small projects (like how google started) which have a few people behind are very vulnerable in google. All a spammer needs is a higher pr site than yours… You can kiss google bye bye if they target you…

    Matt, there must be a way to get support for such serious issues. The re-inclusion request is IF and WHEN it will get read.

    What a close friend advises is “try to find alternative ways to bring traffic”… Other than google…

  15. Matt,

    When are you going to put up a backdrop and start selling ad sponsorship? 😉 T-shirt logos, hat logos, coffee mug, and over the shoulder logos on backdrop…

  16. It looks like they moved the re-inclusion request from the lower left to the upper right of the page, under a break down that says tools.

  17. Matt,

    I agree with JohnMu. If you do submit a reinclusion request, it would be nice to know what is being done with it. I am assuming that there is some way to show a status message on where the reinclusion request is. From my own experience I submitted a reinclusion request a few weeks ago and I have no idea what, if anything, has or has not been done with it. Does it get an automated screening? Does a real person look at it? If a real person looks at it, then it would be nice if we could read some kind of feedback based on their initial or complete review of the site.

    Maybe the Sitemaps team can set expectations a little better on that deal. The way it sits now, filling out the info the request asks for and saying that you are a cheating S.O.B. kinda makes one feel like you will at the very least have someone respond at some point aknowledging that you are a cheating S.O.B. and that you will rot in hell…or something to that effect.

  18. Jason Golod
    You can check the transcript at viperchill, and Unless I’m mistaken, matt did say they are looked at by a real person

  19. I’d like to echo the comments of pavlos and Jason Golod above about 302s, reinclusions and spammers targeting sites.

    What I don’t understand is why it is so hard for Google to close the 302 loophole that allows these kinds of spammer tricks to take place. There is like one digit difference between 301 & 302. Is it so hard for Google to set its algos to treat 302s the same way they treat 301s? If there is a 302 in place all backlink credit for the intial page goes to the page redirected to and the page containing the 302 redirect gets ignored and removed from the index until that point in time it is no longer redirecting.

    How many times have we seen those faux PR10 sites that tricked Google by setting a 302 redirect to Google’s home page?

    There has to be something that can be done to stop punishing hard working web publishers while spammers make a killing spamming the indexes.

  20. Hey, Matt!

    I have a question: How does google treats unique content regarding webpages translated to other languages?? We have a website that have the same pages in Portuguese and English. The layout is the same, but of course on different languages.

    Thanks

  21. So it’s a great way to do a reinclusion… Why are MFA sites now everywhere Matt? Where do we give our input how bogus sites can take over your Adsense and Adwords… Where is the de-include site link?

  22. Aaron Shear, thanks for pointing that out. It’s in the top right under tools now.

    Dave, no problem.

    All else: I’m falling over tired. I’ll try to circle back here when SES cools down some.

  23. Hey Matt,

    While we’re talking reinclusion requests, you might want your spam team to have a look at http://www.caisystems.com/ and ctrl+a that sucker 🙂

    Videos are brilliant, a refreshing change and a break for my eyes!

  24. ok Matt…. You are forgiven hehe…

    But hey from my understanding, Asher and Ken Barbalace are suffering from the same syndrome. Imagine how it feels like to spend all your savings on a project, only to get it damaged by spammers and Google is not helping us, it helps the spammers.

    I am wondering if all the time we spend here and on WW/SEW/etc. was spent on improving our sites, in what state they would be.

  25. Matt –

    Just wanted to thank you for putting this series together. Most of the information is pretty much common sense, but it certainly puts an end to a lot of the myths out there.

    I gave up on the datacenter watching about three months ago after getting into a debate with folks over at WMW over the trends I noticed in certain centers.

    If you have a chance, maybe you can talk about the related: command some time.

    Your cat’s cool too.

    BillyS

  26. Hi,
    I don’t see any reinclusion request link anymore in the sitemap panel, and I can’t find any other way to submit a reinclusion request since the web page refers me back to the sitemaps.
    By the way, smart way of forcing everybody to sign up for sitemaps 🙂

  27. Did you add a new security code this one is very blur?. I thought my vision was getting worse.

    Is there a way to get a ban removed so that it can be indexed. As in I don’t have to have all the backlinks but I would like to get the site so it can start over. I have a good domain that I blatently spammed and it got banned big time. The domain still has value because it is a 4 letter .net and I would like to sell it but if it can’t be indexed in Google it loses some value. I have had it in site maps for a few months now and did a reinclusion request there.

  28. I bought a VERY good domain name a little over a year ago for a very good price …(I should know by now that things that apear too good to be true, usually are).

    The problem is that the domain was used by a spammer and banned by google, before I got it.

    Now after one year+ and three re-inclusion requests (one by email – one by the ‘old’ method of requesting re-inclusion and last month one request via site maps) the site still does not have a single page indexed.

    The site has been in the google site maps program for five months+ and it meets google’s webmasters guidelines in every way, the site is only running WordPress with no added scripts and only original content.

    The only information site maps gives me is that no pages are indexed and to review google’s webmaster guidelines, not much help.

    So is there anything else I can do to get this site included? Or am I just out of luck?

  29. As far as spammers targeting sites and keywords…

    I can tell you I have lost so much money to these spammers that I get physically sick when I think about it…

    Every day now I ask myself. “is it still worth it?”, my work is just going to make more profit for some scumbag spammer, while me and my family scrapes by with what little is left over.

    Do I sound angry… you bet I am.

  30. Hi Matt,
    I recently renamed one of my pages to include the term “accessories” in the URL since that is one of my target keywords. While you are still crawling the page, Google is not using the new URL and its has fallen from 19th place on the term “Acura Accessories” to not being listed at all. I have had my webmaster redo the site map and no results yet. Do you think I am being penalized? Have I done anything wrong?

    Thanks
    Todd

  31. Matt,

    Great video’s, but this re-inclusion request was, like you announced, more of a spoken version of the information that you gave before on your blog. I would have liked some more information on how the communication with the webmasters regarding the re-inclusion request goes. Several people told me that you will get some kind of automated Email that your request is under consideration and after a few weeks some kind of response from Google, but i’ve got nada, nothing and actually think that i must have done something terribly wrong and the re-inclusion request has disappeared into a cosmic black hole or some kind of 4th dimension, which I trust Google engineers have already developed 🙂

    Kind regards,
    Joost

  32. I find it disturbing that to submit a reinclusion request, you have to admit that a given site has broken the google guidelines in the past. I for one, have completely dropped out of that majority of the datacenters (still in a few) but I feel I have not broken any guidelines, so there’s no way I’m going to say I did just to submit a reinclusion request. I think _having_ to agree to that term in order to submit the form is a little ridiculous.

    Perhaps it should be an option, perhaps there should be an option for the scenario where you have 0 pages listed, but don’t feel you’ve broken any guidelines? I know you don’t want to give too much away to the spammers, like “do x and y and your spam site will be listed,” but I think the form needs a little modification.

    Thanks.

  33. Hi Matt,

    I had followed your advice for a site of mine that was delisted and I’m glad to say that I finally got back in!!! Hooray! It took a couple weeks and I don’t think I’m doing well in any of my keywords but I’m sure time will take care of that – right? Well I hope so. Thanks for your great videos – seeing your mug makes it all seem so friendly.

    -Dan

  34. I found that since I recently opened a ecommerce store on Ecrater you can’t use alot of the services that google offers. The format is a free store, and HTML isn’t allowed. So I can’t show ownership in the traditional way.

    I checked my links to the store a couple of weeks ago, and I had some linking. I checked recently and found there were none. I think I may have done something wrong, and possibly followed bad advice from others. I’m NOT sure if I have a penalty etc, and the way the forms are setup on google unless you show ownership of the site you may NEVER know either!

    Is there not a way of showing this for people in my situation, and to submit a reinclusion request directly?

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