Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 18 years 3 months 17 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
It looks like there’s a better place to submit a reinclusion request than the one put forth by Matt Cutts in his blog. Do it from your Google Sitemaps account.
Everything Matt says to do, from admission of guilt, to an apology and the assurance it won’t reoccur are true, but submitting it from your Google Sitemaps account is now the preferred method by Google, I think.
I only discovered it because Matt’s suggestion, (to begin by going to this link –
http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py ) did not offer the choice that he said to select – “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website†as one of the options.
That left me puzzled, and I didn’t want to submit my request there if it was no longer the right place. I started poking around the rest of the Google help files, where I stumbled across this:
How do I request reinclusion of my site?
If your site has violated our webmaster guidelines, and you’ve made changes to it so that it meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we’ll evaluate your site. To request reinclusion, log in to Google Sitemaps, choose the “Request reinclusion” link, and follow the steps outlined there.
So, I logged into my Google Sitemaps account, and sure enough, at the very bottom under Tools, I saw the link. With a long list of my client domains listed above it, I might never would have found it on my own!
From there you go immediately to a form that lets you check boxes admitting guilt, acknowledging your modifications, and you agree not to do it again.
Theres even a box to explain yourself with the details of how you were lead astray. (In this case, my new client had over 300 pages of duplicate content, with only a headline changing from page to page.)
Following this process, (and after removing the offending content) we were back in the index in under 10 days. To him, I’m a hero, but now you know how I did it…
