After You Have Been Penalized By Google

You've been penalized by Google. It is not the end of the world, but by search engine optimization standards, it is pretty darn close.

First step is to figure out why this happened to you. If you did shady tactics such as linking to a ton of link farms, your prognosis isn't good as good as if you had just done some on-page keyword stuffing. (For more information, see the MyMommyBiz article Has Your Site Been Penalized By Google to determine if this is what got you banned.)

But there is another reason why your site got penalized from Google, particularly if you have always been on the right side of the tracks with your site.

The primary reason is that when Google did its monthly crawl of the entire web, your website was unavailable. It could have been a glitch, your server might have been down, or your server might have been available, but just took a little too long to respond to Googlebot's request, so it assumed it wasn't there.

When this occurs, Googlebot (this is the name of Google's web crawler) may come back and check you during that same update, but maybe not. The higher your PR is, the more likely they will double check.

If you think your site might have been temporarily unavailable when Googlebot paid a visit, go back and check your server logs and see if you can find any recent visits from Googlebot. If Google came and visited most or all of your pages, there is likely another reason for the problem than your website being unavailable.

First, you want to clean up your site. Follow the webmaster guidelines to the letter, and remove any shady SEO (search engine optimization) techniques you may have employed, or that someone you hired to do SEO work for you did. Remember, just because you didn't dp it yourself doesn't make your site any less guilty in the eyes of Google.

But Google will consider reincluding sites if you send an email to webmaster@google.com with "reinclusion request" as the subject - AFTER you have cleaned the entire site up. Do not email before your site is completely clean of spam techniques - if they see your site still doing the things it was banned for, you might hurt your chances to get your site included into the index again once it is clean.

Google also publishes webmaster guidelines here.

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