How I Got Reindexed with a Google Reconsideration Request

Before you look into a Google Reconsideration Request (previously known as Reinclusion Request) , you need to check if you really have a Google Penalty. If you’re sure you have, you’ll need to make some changes to your site and let Google know about them.

Start by looking for reasons why you could have been given a penalty. If your site has any of the following, you need to get rid of them:

• With the exception of meta tags and alt tags, does your site include text which is there for search engines to see and not for people to read?
• Is your site made up of mostly content taken from other websites?
• Does your site contain anything which may cause harm to a visitor’s computer such as viruses?
• Have you been buying, selling or exchanging links to improve your rank?

If not, the most likely reason you were penalised is that you you’ve been classed as a thin affiliate (as I was).

Are you a Thin Affiliate?

A thin affiliate site is one which appears to offer little value to its visitors. The only people that will benefit from them are their owners. That means it has adverts but not useful information. The text on the site is mainly there to convince people to buy a product or to appear in search results. If your sites simply points a user to a shop elsewhere on the Internet, Google thinks they might as well miss out the middleman and go straight to the shop. Sites like this are also likely to use black/grey hat tricks to gain higher search engine rankings.

How to Stop being a Thin Affiliate

To get Google’s respect back you’re going to have to put real work into showing your site is useful. Ask yourself if a user would have a reason to come to your site rather than go directly to any site you are affiliated with? If not you need to change your site so there are reasons. Here are some examples;

• Review products in an unbiased manner. Don’t overhype the one you are trying to sell. Why not give genuine reviews of products stating the benefits and flaws of each. You can provide an affiliate link to each of the products. Google doesn’t mind affiliate links, just as long as they aren’t the sole purpose of the site. How long would it take to write a few good reviews? Is it worth taking that time to get your site ranking well again?
• A price comparison chart requires little time to research but can provide a good reason for someone to come to your site; it saves them having to hunt around for the best price.
• Collect news and give your own opinion on it. The easiest way to get news on a particular subject is to use Google News. If you’re promoting the latest LG TV, type “lg” into Google News and see what stories involving LG are happening. Read it, write up about it in your own words and provide your opinion.
• Go to forums related to your website and see what everyone is talking about, then write an article on the subject. You’re not writing a sales pitch here, you’re trying to be informative.

It just takes a bit of creativity and time to come up with something useful to your visitors. Once you’ve given some purpose to your site and removed elements which exist only to influence search engines, it’s time to get on your knees and beg Google to let you back on their index.

Making a Google Reconsideration Request

Create an account for or sign into Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to register your penalised site with them. Now double check you’ve understood everything by reading through this and the webmaster guidelines.

Finally, go to the reconsideration page and tell Google all about what you’ve been through. It’s a good idea to be detailed and show you’ve put a lot of work into turning the site around. Below you can see the reconsideration request I sent to them which worked for me and you’re welcome to use it as a template:

Hi,
Over a month ago I noticed my site had been deindexed. I guess the reason was that it was classed as a thin affiliate. Since then I’ve been completely reworking the website to offer visitors something useful and unique. It is almost an entirely new website. Here are the changes I’ve made:

Removed all image affiliate links. [Actually I had added one back in before they reviewed it, so I was worried that might cause mistrust but they didn’t seem to mind]

Removed almost all text affiliate links.

There are now only a few remaining affiliate links. These are in context and the links would be there even if they were not affiliate ones.

Much of the old content which seemed less useful to visitors has been removed.

Main navigation is now more meaningful to users (the heading of each page is now also the anchor text).

Lots of new unique content has been written and images included, you can get an overview of the sort of information by reading the titles of the recent posts. I will point out a few examples of particularly useful information for visitors below:

You can see here [url of a forum not run by me] that lots of people are requesting information on reliability of retailers. My site aims to give people that information by pulling data from various web resources (and linking to them so users can validate what I’m saying). This is demonstrated best here [url]

Here [url] you can see a short review of some the best software for [product] along with images and links to download them (which aren’t as easy to find through Google as you’d expect so it’s useful).

The site will not return to being a thin affiliate. I am much happier with the new classier looking, more useful website. If traffic returns to the site I intend to carry out more consumer research at my own expense in order to aid my visitors in finding quality products.

7 Days after sending Google the reconsideration request I got a message sent to my webmaster tools account. It gave no details other than to say the site had been reviewed. The message doesn’t even tell you if you were successful or not. I did a search in Google and for the first time in over a month my site was back up there! It was a great feeling.

I hope you can do the same with your site. If you have any questions, I’m happy to help. Good luck.