Requesting reconsideration using Google Webmaster Tools

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

If your site does not appear in
Google Search results,
you might be understandably worried. Here, we’ve put together some information to help you
determine when and how to submit a
reconsideration request
for your site.

You can follow along as
Bergy
(the webmaster of example.com in our video) tries to find out whether he needs to submit a
reconsideration request for his Ancient Roman Politics blog. Of course, not all webmasters’
problems can be traced back to
Wysz
(-:, but the simple steps outlined below can help you determine the
right solution for your particular case.

Check for access issues

You may want to check if there are any access issues with your site – you can do this by logging
in to your Webmaster Tools
account. On the Overview page you’ll be able to see when Googlebot last successfully crawled the
home page of your site. Another way to do this is to check the cache date for your site’s
home page. For more detailed information about how Googlebot crawls your site, you might want to
check the crawl rate graphs (find them in Tools > Set crawl
rate).

On the Overview page you can also check whether there are any crawling errors. For example, if
your server was busy or unavailable when we tried to access your site, you would get a “URL
unreachable” error message. Alternatively, there might be URLs in your site blocked by your
robots.txt file. You can see this in “URLs restricted by robots.txt”. If there are URLs listed
there which you did not expect, you can go to Tools and select “Analyze robots.txt”—there
you can make sure that your robots.txt file is properly formatted and only blocking the parts of
your site which you don’t want Google to crawl.

Other than the examples mentioned above, there are several more types of crawl errors—HTTP
errors and URLs timed out errors, just to name a few. Even thought we haven’t highlighted them
here, you will still see alerts for all of them on the Overview page in your Webmaster Tools
account.

Check for messages

If Google has no problems accessing your site, check to see if there is a message waiting for you
in the
Message Center
of your Webmaster Tools account. This is the place Google uses to communicate important
information to you regarding your Webmaster Tools account and the sites you manage. If we have
noticed there is something wrong with your site, we may send you a message there, detailing some
issues which you need to fix to bring your site into compliance with the Webmaster Guidelines.

Read the Webmaster Guidelines

If you don’t see a message in the Message Center, check to see if your site is or has at some
point been in violation of the
Webmaster Guidelines. You can
find them, and much more, in our
Help Center.

Fix your site

If your site is in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines and you think that this might have
affected how your site is viewed by Google, this would be a good time to submit a reconsideration
request. But before you do that, make changes to your site so that it falls within our
guidelines.

Submit a reconsideration request

Now you can go ahead and submit a request for reconsideration. Log in to your Webmaster Tools
account. Under Tools, click on “Request reconsideration” and follow the steps. Make sure to
explain what you think was wrong with your site and what steps you have taken to fix it.

Once you’ve submitted your request, you’ll see a message from us in the Message Center confirming
that we’ve received it. We’ll then review your site for compliance with the Webmaster Guidelines.

We hope this post has helped give you an idea when and how to submit a reconsideration request.
If you’re not sure why Google isn’t including your site, a great place to look for help is our
Webmaster Help Group.
There you will find many knowledgeable and friendly webmasters and Googlers, who would be happy to
look at your site and give suggestions on how you could fix things. You can find links to both the
Help Center and the Webmaster Group at google.com/webmasters.

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Search Quality Team