MICHAEL: Hi everyone.
My name is Michael, and with me is Tiffany.
And we are both from the search quality
team here at Google.
And we're handling the Webmaster question today.
And this one comes from Matt Cutts in the Bay Area.
And Matt wants to know, "Can you tell us about the
reconsideration process from Google's perspective, and has
there been anything that's changed in the process
recently?"
TIFFANY OBEROI: So to start with, I'm a webmaster.
How do I know if I should file a reconsideration request?
MICHAEL: Sure.
There are a few indications as to when it might be a good
time to file a reconsideration request. First of all, if you
know that you have violated one of Google's Webmaster
Guidelines, that would be an excellent time to, first,
clean up your site.
So make sure that you're in compliance with the webmaster
guidelines.
And then let us know that you've made changes.
I've removed the hidden text or something like that.
And then file for reconsideration.
We've also been working on notifying people when we
notice that there's been an issue with their site.
So maybe you were hacked, and we've detected it.
And a hacker has put spam on your site.
We'll often send you a message within, again, Webmaster
Tools, letting you know that there is an
issue with your site.
Again, clean it up, and file for reconsideration.
And sometimes you might see that your site isn't showing
up in search results, or you've seen a
loss of search traffic.
Sometimes that can be a spam issue, and so that's also
another good time to go ahead and file for reconsideration.
Though before you do that, I would recommend checking out a
help article that we have called, "Site Not Doing Well
In Search," and we can leave a link to that, which explains
some other reasons why your site might not be doing well
beyond having a spam issue.
So that's how you know it might be a good time to file
for reconsideration So Tiffany, maybe you can talk
about when I do file a reconsideration request as a
webmaster, what makes a really good request?
What should I write?
TIFFANY OBEROI: Good question.
So what we're really looking for in your reconsideration
request is you say what spam issue you had and what steps
you took to fix the problem.
So you're not helping anyone if you don't admit what the
problem was because we already know.
There's no sense hiding it.
So tell us what the specific violation was.
Maybe you had some bad SEO advice from someone.
Whatever the issue was, point out the issue, and point out
exactly what steps you took to fix it.
So an example, if you give a reconsideration request, like,
"My site adheres to the guidelines," that's not as
useful as a request that says, "I had some hidden text on the
home page, but now I've removed it." In that second
example, you're saying what the problem was, and you're
saying what you did to fix it.
So those are the type of a request that make it really
easy for us to handle because it's very
straightforward for us.
So Michael, from a Google perspective, what happens
after I submit my request?
MICHAEL: Yeah sure.
So in cases where there was a manual spam action on that
site, we'll actually have a human from the web spam team
go ahead and look at that request. And a little bit
about what they see when they're processing this
reconsideration request is they can see what that manual
spam action was that was placed on the site in the
past. They can see what you wrote in Webmaster Tools when
you were filing your reconsideration request.
And they also, of course, can check out the site.
They can load it as Googlebot.
They have a few other tools that we use to evaluate the
quality of websites.
And what they're looking for is simply is this site still
violating the guidelines, or is this site now clean, and
it's spam free?
And so in the case that the webmaster hasn't cleaned
things up yet, that request, of course, would be denied.
But if the webmaster had--
they received a notification, maybe someone else had done
something to their site-- either they were hacked or a
bad SEO or something like that--
cleaned it up.
They wrote exactly what it was in the reconsideration
request. Then the reviewer would notice that, and they
actually have the ability right there to go ahead and
revoke that manual action.
And so that's pretty much how a reconsideration request
would be processed on our end.
So once we're done with it, say we've revoked the manual
action on that site, what would the webmaster look
forward to happening next?
TIFFANY OBEROI: Yeah.
So we know that this is a stressful time for webmasters.
You've submitted this request, and then you're just waiting
to hear back.
And in the past, we didn't do very much in terms of
communication back to you.
But we've listened.
We've heard a lot of webmasters say, we want more
communication about what happened to my request. And
we've heard this, and we're looking for a lot of ways to
improve the process.
So a long time ago, we sent nothing back after your
request was processed.
And then a little while ago, we started sending messages
of, "Your request was processed," but no specifics
about what the outcome was.
Recently, in some cases, we're able to give now messages that
say specifically what the outcome was.
So for example, if you had a manual spam action that we
were able to revoke, in a lot of cases, we're
able to tell you.
Or if you are still in violation of our guidelines
and you need to take a harder look and figure out--
maybe it's hacked, and you know it's hacked, but you
couldn't find and remove all of the bad content--
we'll let you know.
In the majority of the time, we actually send a message
that says, "You weren't affected by any spam action at
all." So in those cases, you can take a look at our help
center articles, figure out, maybe you have some access
issues, maybe you're blocking us in your robots.txt.
A good place to go at that time is look in the forum, and
ask your question there.
There's a lot of really helpful people.
A lot of external users and Googlers also read the forums.
Even if they don't post, they might read and give--
ask questions to the internal teams that actually handle the
reconsideration requests.
So you might be able to get help that way.
MICHAEL: So yeah, I hope that gives you some good insights
into how reconsiderations work at Google.