Google's Tiffany Oberoi, in an interview with Eric Enge of Stone Temple, sheds light on the all important, Google's reconsideration requests.
Many websites have fallen victims to Google's emphasis on quality. In their attempt to get their websites back on track, webmasters end up sending endless reconsideration requests. This interview set's out to clarify the reconsideration request process.
Matt Cutts from Google, was spotted Tweeting the following:
To me, the highlight of this SEOs must read interview, especially for those who have already submitted or are in the process of submitting a reconsideration request is, when Tiffany was asked “ What would you recommend the structure of a reconsideration request look like? In other words, what major issues should it address? Are there things to avoid?”
To which she replied, “ Here are a few tips:
1. Be specific. Carefully review Google’s webmaster guidelines and tell us what issues you found on your site and how you fixed them.
2. Avoid hiding information. This is the time to address the issues head on. For example, a reconsideration request that says, “My sites adheres to the guidelines.” is not as useful as one that says, “I had some hidden text at the bottom of my homepage, but I have removed it now.” The second example makes it clear what the initial problem was and what has changed. The more detail you can provide, the better. It helps us assess the situation more fully.
3. We want to be assured that we aren’t going to see these spammy techniques again. It’s helpful if you can include details about steps you’ve taken to prevent it from happening again, policy changes, etc. The people who review these requests want to be confident that the spam techniques have been removed and are not likely to return.
4. Don’t mention how much you spend on ads. The team that handles reconsideration requests only cares about search quality. It’s irrelevant and doesn’t help your case to mention buying ads or being a partner or customer of other products.
We get a lot of reconsideration requests from webmasters that are not even affected by a spam issue, so my other advice is to explore other possible issues as well. For example, check Webmaster Tools for crawl errors. Make sure your robots.txt isn’t blocking Googlebot from accessing your site. Here’s an article with a detailed discussion of other possible ranking problems. ”
