If you've been experimenting with SEO, or you employ as SEO company that might be doing things outside Google's guidelines, and your site has taken a precipitous drop recently, you may have a spam penalty. A reinclusion request asks Google to remove any potential spam penalty.

The first step is to take a long, hard look at your website. Is there hidden text, hidden links, or cloaking on your site, especially on the front page? Are there doorway pages that do a JavaScript or some other redirect to a different page? Were you trying to use some automated program to get links or scrape Google? Whatever you find that you think may have been against Google’s guidelines, correct or remove those pages.

Now where should you send a reinclusion request? This has changed in the last few months from an Email address to a web form. The best location to go is

http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py.

You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” and then select “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking.” Click Continue, and on the page that shows up, make sure to type “Reinclusion Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form. Upper- or lower-case doesn’t matter, but make sure you use the words “reinclusion request” in the subject line so it gets routed to the right place.

Now we come to the heart of things: what goes into a reinclusion request. Fundamentally, Google wants to know two things:

1. That any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and
2. That it’s not going to happen again. I’d recommend giving a short explanation of what happened from your perspective: what actions may have led to any penalties and any corrective action that you’ve taken to prevent any spam in the future.

If you employed an SEO company, it indicates good faith if you tell Google specifics about the SEO firm and what they did – it assists Google in evaluating reinclusion requests. Note that SEO and mostly-affiliate sites may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reincluded; such sites should be quite familiar with Google’s quality guidelines.

Okay, so you found the hidden text that your webmaster put on your front page, you removed it, and you sent your reinclusion request off to Google. How long do you have to wait now? That depends on when Google reviews the request and on the type of spam penalty you have. In the days of monthly index updates it could take 6-8 weeks for a site to be reincluded after a site was approved, and the severest spam penalties can take that long to clear out after an approval. For less severe stuff like hidden text, it may only take 2-3 weeks, depending on when someone looks at the request and if the request is approved.