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While the main criteria for a successful reinclution request to Google has not changed, the location to submit a request has changed a number of times in the last 2 or 3 years.

Matt Cutts noted in a January 2007 blog post Undetectable spam that the main criteria for a successful reinclusion request to Google is still “remove the spam and find a way to assure us it won’t happen again.”

Back in September of 2005 Matt posted on his blog a post on how to Filing a reinclusion request and listed in that post that the best locatoin to make a reinclusion was on the Web Search Help Center page. While the September post still applies and is a good read the location of where to submit the request doesn’t apply.

In August of the 2006 Matt did a video that was a short update to his September 2005 post mentioning that Google Webmasters Tools was now the place to submit your reinclusion request. (Matt noted in this video that the reinclusion link was in the lower left. It is now on the right side in the middle of the page.)

I just transcribed this video and posted it on my blog under the title Matt Cutts Video Reinclusion Requests.

To do a reinclusion request, login at Google Webmasters Tools. On the right side of the screen there is a Tools link. Click on the plus button by the Tools link and it expands so you can select the submit a reinclusion request link.

Click that link and you will be taken to the reinclusion submission form. On that page you will be required to click a checkbox that states by submitting this form you acknowledge the following three points.

1. I believe this site has violated Google’s quality guidelines in the past.
2. This site no longer violates Google’s quality guidelines.
3. I have read and agree to abide by Google’s quality guidelines.

Below that check box you will find the following instructions.

Tell us more about what happened: what actions might have led to any penalties, and what corrective actions have been taken. If you used a search engine optimization (SEO) company, please note that. Describing the SEO firm and their actions is a helpful indication of good faith that may assist in evaluation of reinclusion requests. If you recently acquired this domain and think it may have violated the guidelines before you owned it, let us know that below. In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reincluded.

And below the instructions is the field where you provide the above requested information.

The following is a list of 6 points I have prepared that you should have in mind while you are reviewing your site, fixing any issues you find, and writing your reinclusion request.

1. If you have done some thing spammy admit it. Even if had another company or consultant do it and you knew it was spammy confess that you knew about it. Honesty is the best policy.

2. Hire a quality white hat SEO firm and have them look over your site and come up with a list of practices that they consider spammy. You should only name this firm on your reinclusion request if they are a strict white hat SEO firm that doesn’t advocate, sell, or publish SEO techniques on their website that don’t follow the Google guidelines. This would include practices like buying directory submissions and trading them with relevant sites for a link to your site; The selling of text link ads for Pagerank vote and link juice; The selling of blog submissions to get you inbound links for ranking weight; The automated building of landing pages where the content is not original etc.

3. Provide a time line of when the spam was added to your website and when you noticed that you had a penalty and when you removed the spam from your site. The more information you give the better.

4. Note each and every spammy practice that is found on your site and the corrective measures you have taken.

5. Make sure you correct all spammy techniques use and have a quality white hat SEO firm go over your site before you submit you reinclusion request.

6. You need to make a commitment to follow the Google guidelines and to not do anything spammy on your site any more. If you are generating revenue from the traffic Google is sending to your site you may need to provide more evidence that you have cleaned up your act. In some cases you may want to consider firing the person or SEO firm that was responsible for implementing the practices that were contrary to the Google guidelines and providing proof that this has been done. Including a link to the dismissal letter would not be out of order in some cases.

If you are looking for a white hat SEO company to provide you with help in going over your site and writing your reinclusion, SEO Company has a Search Engine Penalty Consulting package that will help get you back into Google index.

Matt and Emmy answer Google Questions: - How do I do a reinclusion request? - What should I put into a reinclusion request? - What does Google need to know before it reincludes a site in its index?
Matt Cutts Video Reinclusion Requests 2 min 44 sec Aug 5, 2006

Hey, this is Matt and Emmy coming to you on Thursday after hockey at the Googleplex. Yes sure your a good cat. Let’s talk ah, I don’t know, reinclusion requests. So, I did a blog post about reinclusion requests awhile ago, um, the proceedure has changed a little bit though. So imagine if you spammed or some one you have hired as a webmaster has spammed, and you are now no longer in Google, what do you do now.

So, the best thing that I would recommend, is to, ah, register in sitemaps that’s our webmaster console or webmaster central, what ever you want to call it. And ah, it’s basically the place where you can get all kinds of information. Some times you can ever find out if you have penalties on your site. So we can’t show all the penalties that we have just because ah, you know, that will clue in malicious spammers as well. But if there are real, yes, legit sites that have ah, that hahaha Emmy hahaha, that have valid content, good girl, ah we want them to be able to be found so we can show penalties for some sites. Ah there you go.

So if you do have a penalty or if you suspect you might have a penalty, go ahead and go to ah, register in site maps and then fill out a reinclusion request. I think it is like at the bottom left or some think like that, and the more information you can give the better. So for example, ah if you were using a SEO or some body that ah, your website got hacked or what ever, you know, give as much specifics as you can. Ah you also want to give some kind of time line, or here’s what was going on, ah here’s the mistake we made.

The most important thing is Google needs to know that your, it’s not going to happen again. So some way of letting us know or convincing us that what ever you think the problem was, ah usually you might have a pretty clear idea, some thing like hidden test, doorway pages, sneaky redirects using Javascript, any thing like that. Um, we need to know that those pages, those violations of our quality guidelines are not going to come back.

So that’s the procedure I would go with, try to include as much detail as possible about how it might of happened, ah and what you are going to do it make sure it doesn’t happen again, and then that goes into a queue which we check and try to find out okay, ah has the hidden text been removed, stuff like that.

So um, reinclusion requests definitely get looked at by people and that is the procedure that I would recommend to use, ah to put one in.