The 4 Basics of Reinclusion Requests

It’s been a long time since I had to deal with a Reinclusion Request, but someone asked me about this yesterday, and it’s worth a post because it’s an issue that many people encounter. The outline here should apply to any of the search engines. First, here is where you find the reinclusion form for Google and Yahoo:

1. Google: Go to Google webmaster tools, click on the “Tools” link, and then “Submit a reinclusion request” link.
2. Yahoo: Yahoo reinclusion request form

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So now onto the meat of this post. How do you fill these forms out? Here are the 4 basics of a reinclusion request, regardless of the engine:

1. Understand the context of the situation with complete clarity. Search engines get lots of these requests every day, and their point of view is that violated their terms of service. You are asking for help from someone who has every right to be suspicious of you.
2. Clearly define what you did wrong, that led (to the best of your knowledge) to your site being banned.
3. Clearly show that you have fixed the problem.
4. Clearly state that it won’t happen again. If you used an SEO firm who did the things that led to you being banned, make it clear that they are no longer working with you. If you did it yourself, be very contrite, and make it clear that you understand what the right thing to do is now.

Equally important is to have a clear idea of things that you should not put into your reinclusion request:

1. Don’t use reinclusion request forms to ask someone to diagnose why your site was banned. It will never happen. They get way too many of these per day.
2. Don’t whine about how much this is costing you. This is not material to their decision-making process, and in fact, can irritate them – remember you need their goodwill.
3. Don’t compare their results with those of another search engine (either traffic or rankings) in order to point out that something must be wrong. Search engine algorithms differ greatly, and the results you get will too.
4. Don’t submit a reinclusion request in less you are in fact banned. I.e. no pages in their index, and/or long phrases in quotes “Our blue widgets have a unique azure tone …” don’t bring up your pages

The bottom line is to keep it short, crisp, and to the point. Really research the things you may have done wrong, and fix them all in advance. You do not want to have the engineer look at the site and decide not to do anything about it because you did not address some issue, because when you send in a second request it will be even harder still to get their attention.
You also need to be aware that you will probably never get any response, other than an automated one. If you have done your job well, and have explained the situation well, you may just find your site back in the index one day. Let’s hope so. Good luck!