Thursday, September 15, 2011
If your site isn’t appearing in Google search results, or it’s performing more poorly than it once
did (and you believe that it does not violate our
Webmaster Guidelines
), you can ask Google to reconsider your site. Over time, we’ve worked to improve the
reconsideration process for webmasters. A couple of years ago, in addition to
confirming that we had received the request,
we started sending a second message to webmasters confirming that we had processed their request.
This was a huge step for webmasters who were anxiously awaiting results. Since then, we’ve
received feedback that webmasters wanted to know the outcome of their requests. Earlier this year,
we started experimenting with sending more detailed reconsideration request responses and the
feedback we’ve gotten has been very positive!
Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to
revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request. Or, we could tell you if your
site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once
you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.
If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we
may let you know that as well. Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in
which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your
needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are
preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it. For more help debugging ranking issues, read
our article about why a site may not be showing up in Google search results.
We’ve made a lot of progress on making the entire reconsideration request process more
transparent. We aren’t able to reply to individual requests with specific feedback, but now many
webmasters will be able to find out if their site has been affected by a manual action and they’ll
know the outcome of the reconsideration review. In an ideal world, Google could be completely
transparent about how every part of our rankings work. However, we have to maintain a delicate
balance: trying to give as much information to webmasters as we can without letting spammers probe
how to do more harm to users. We’re happy that Google has set the standard on tools, transparency,
and communication with site owners, but we’ll keep looking for ways to do even better.
Comment nous l'appliquons
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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