Recovering After A Penalty

Is it a penalty?

First, you need to be sure you actually have a penalty. Using the site:www.domain.com search is one way to find out that your site is nowhere; another way is to search for some unique text from your home page. Neither search is useful for new sites, which may simply be waiting to be listed. In most cases, it's the site statistics or a drop in trade that brings the bad news.

If your site has been penalised, you need to start by being very honest with your self, and undoing anything you did that may breech Search Engine Guidelines.

Check out the Guidelines carefully:

Google Webmaster Help Center

Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines

Live Search Site Owner Help

Ask: About: Webmasters

For now, I'd clean the site up completely; remove the resources pages, check anything that could be against search engine guidelines. READ the search engine guidelines.

I'm not suggesting this as a penance - it's purely practical, and works something like this:

If (for example) the main offence is the links, then the Google penalty is simply a 'bad neighborhood' penalty - clean up, and things will often gradually improve (reappearance in Google is your proof, though a good position will take much longer).

I would not manually resubmit, nor - at this stage - ask for resubmission. Clean up, and it should happen. Building and submitting a Google site map will not hurt, and will ensure you get spidered.

If you do not get good news within weeks, then you may have to consider writing to google, requesting readmission. Don't do it lightly - you can only do it once, and here's why:

Asking Google requires a human being to check your site. That is serious time investment by Google, in your site. If it ain't clean, don't even think about asking a second time ... it won't happen! And not only do they demaind a clean site, but some kind of assurance that the problems will not be repeated.

Painful though it may be, you have to think long term. Once you have checked for the major issues, then look for the little things; because once your site, for whatever reason, is in the Search Engines Sights, then all those little things that didn't matter, now need to be sorted. They may not have got you the penalty, but they'll stop the site surviving a human check.

And it's the Little Things that will leave you with Sick Site Syndrome - languishing at the foot of the results!

Getting 'unpenalized' is your best and only hope, but there's no compromises - if it's not squeeky clean, nothing will ever get better.

How do I request reinclusion of my site?

Google says: "If your site has violated our webmaster guidelines, and you've made changes to it so that it meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we'll evaluate your site.

In addition, if you recently purchased a domain that you think may have violated our guidelines before you owned it, you can use the reinclusion request form to let us know that you recently acquired the site and that it now adheres to the guidelines.

To request reinclusion, log in to Google webmaster tools, click Tools, then choose the Request reinclusion link and follow the steps outlined there."

SEO Tip #2

If many of your deeper pages fail to appear in Google's index, then you have a real need for an XML sitemap.

Even that is no guarantee, but it can be a valuable and effective way to get new URLs spidered, provided that your site navigation has been previously checked.

If you use webmaster tools (and if you don't, now is the time to start!), then using a Google sitemap can aid diagnosis too.

See also: Google's webmaster Tools - More Tips