The Booster Seat Episode 7: Google Reconsideration Requests
Hey there, Boosters! Welcome to another edition of the Booster Seat. Today we’re going to be talking about Google Reconsideration Requests and how you can handle them.
The first thing you need to know about a Google Reconsideration Request, or even manual actions, is that you need Google Webmaster Tools installed on your website to be able to receive any message of any kind. Once you have that installed you can follow this process outlined here.
These five steps were given by Google a few weeks ago by Google in one of their Google recon activities and posts they have online.
Identify Manual Action
The first thing that Google suggests we do is to identify a manual action. This is a message that Google sends to your Google Webmaster Tools, which requires you (the user) to login in and read those messages. A helpful hint is that you can actually set up auto-emails to forward to your email so that anytime Google sends a message to your Google Webmaster Tools, it can send an email directly to you.
Understand Manual Action
Google wants you to understand what’s wrong with your website so you can fix it and make the web a better place. Knowing that, they have tons of helpful forums, webpages, and videos that can help you understand the manual action and the steps you need to take to fix it.
Inorganic Links
One of the most common manual actions out there are inorganic links to the websites. Google suggests that when you remove inorganic links that you don’t just submit a disavow list through one of Google Webmaster’s disavow tools. They actually suggest that you try to remove these. They suggest going to the websites that are pointing to you and remove those links from your website.
Fetch as Google
Fetching as Google actually sends a Google bot to your website and scrapes your website. It displays what the Google bot sees your website is displaying. This is great because if you have a hacked website, malware, or something wrong with your site that you don’t actually notice, Google bot can, so Google can really give you more insight into that.
Documentation
Lastly, when you are sending reconsideration request, Google’s asking that you send supporting documentation. More is not better in the documentation sense. You really want to be clear and precise. People are manually reviewing these document requests to put you into reconsideration status and reconsidering you to be indexed into Google.
A helpful hint is if you have the inorganic links, as an example, and you’ve removed those a documentation, you would want to send documentation of a list of links that you’ve removed, the list of links you tried to remove and couldn’t, and the list of what you had to disavow.
This shows Google that you’re putting an effort into your website and making it better online and that effort is going to help you be reconsidered.
I hope this is helpful. I’d love to hear your comments and questions!
Stay cool!
