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Hello.
We have a fun question from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Benson Senator asks, "Could you please give details on
what should be included in a proper reconsideration
request?" Fantastic question.
We have done a video about this.
I think Brian White and a web spam analyst, Rachel, also had
given their perspective.
But I'll give you a very high level view and then maybe a
few things to chew on and think about.
At a very high level view, the goal of your reconsideration
request is, number one, to tell Google you've stopped
whatever violations of the quality guidelines were
happening-- paid links, cloaking, scraping, doorways.
Whatever it was, you need to make a clear and compelling
case that that has actually stopped.
That behavior no longer is going on and that you've cured
that as much as possible.
So if you were doing paid links, you've gotten as many
of those links pulled down as you possibly can.
The second aspect of a reconsideration request is to
basically give us a good faith assurance that it
won't happen again.
You don't want to say, oh, well, this site looks like
it's reformed.
OK.
We're going to lift this manual action.
And then they immediately go back to spamming or doing
their old tricks.
So what you want to do is step into Google's shoes and say,
OK, what would best convince Google that we've turned the
corner and that this behavior has stopped, and that we've
cured whatever was going on, and it's not
going to happen again?
So great things to include--
things like details of the sorts of sites that you were
contacting.
If you were removing links, for example.
If you used an SCO and they really just shot you in the
foot because they were doing all sorts of unethical things,
that's the sort of thing where I would give us
details about that.
Tell us about the link network or the SCO or
that sort of stuff.
If it was someone in-house, what have you done to make
sure that it doesn't happen again?
I was talking to a large company who had done a
reconsideration request.
And they were talking about how they put a training
program in place so that future people would understand
these were the violations of our quality guidelines,
whereas these behaviors were OK.
Basically, the more stuff you can do to give that kind of
clear, compelling evidence, the easier it is for Google to
make an assessment.
Ideally, it's best if you include as much information as
possible, actually, within the reconsideration request.
We tend to be a little bit leery of if you're inserting
hyperlinks that go off to random places.
If we can't know where they're going to go, then we have to
think about is someone going to try to give us malware or
something like that?
You can include links to a Google Doc or Google
Spreadsheet if you want to show sites that you've
contacted because it is possible for us to view those
sorts of docs without worrying about what sort of things
might be included or revealing the identity of the person who
is looking at the reconsideration request.
But just like any time when you're trying to convince
somebody, you want to make sure that you show that you
have taken a lot of effort, that you have tried to clean
things up, and that basically it won't happen again.
And the more we can suss out and try to assess whether
you're now of that mindset where you're not just going to
try to do another fly-by-night trick or whether things will
lapse again, the easier it is for Google to say, OK.
It looks like things are in pretty good shape.
So let's go ahead and grant that reconsideration request.