Tips on requesting reconsideration

Key Takeaways

hi I'm Brian White and this is my colleague Rachel and we're in the search quality team in Google in the webpam group and we here today with some tips on the reconsideration process all right let's start with a case where you know your site has violated the Google guidelines it's important to admit any mistakes you've made and let us know what you've done to try to fix them sometimes we get requests from people who say my site aderes with the guidelines now that's not really enough information for us so please be as detailed as possible realize that there are people actually reading these requests including the people in this room if you don't know what your site might have done to get a penalty go back to the Google guidelines and reread them carefully before requesting reconsideration look at the things to avoid and ask questions of people that work on your site if you don't work on it yourself if you'd like the advice of a third party you can also seek help on our Google Web Master Forum as sometimes we get reconsideration requests where the requestor associates technical website issues with the penalty uh an example could be uh that a server timed out uh for a while or that bad content was delivered for a time um Google is pretty adaptive to these kinds of transient uh issues with websites so people sometimes misread uh the situation as I have a penalty um and then seek reconsideration um it's probably a good idea to wait a bit and see if things revert to their previous State um also some people uh attribute uh duplicate content uh with uh with leading to a penalty and usually the problem lies elsewhere and say you enter a partnership uh with someone else another website and uh they put this combined effort together in a way that goes against our quality guidelines uh and involves both uh your website and theirs uh and then the end effort uh reflects badly on both um you have control over your site but sometimes it's hard to get stuff cleaned up on sites that you don't control um we are sympathetic uh to these situations uh just make your best effort uh to document uh that in a complete reconsideration request in the case of say uh bad links that were gathered um point us to a URL that shows your exhaustive effort uh to clean that up and also we have pretty good tools internally uh so don't try to fool us um they're actual people as Rachel said looking at your reports uh if you intentionally pass along bad or misleading information uh we will disregard that request for reconsideration and please don't spam the reconsideration form it doesn't help to submit multiple requests all at the same time just one detailed concise report and just get it right the first time your requests will be reviewed by a member our team and we do review them promptly that said if you have some new information to add about your site go ahead and file a new reconsideration request and finally if reconsideration does happen Please be aware that it can take some time to notice when a penalty has been lifted we appreciate your patience yes the bottom line is that uh we care very deeply for our search engine users and want them to be happy and not have to complain uh so make sure that a uh the issues are fixed with uh your site before filing reconsideration and B uh make sure that we don't have to worry about your site violating the quality guidelights in the future um and so for the people who are part of the reconsideration process uh from our end uh thank you thank you