Google Expands Webmaster Documentation Around Reconsideration Requests

It can be disheartening when a webmaster gets a notification from Google that they’ve done something against their guidelines and they now have a “manual action” applied to their site, thus their rankings and traffic from Google may be negatively impacted.

Most of you reading this deal with these issues for your clients all day long, but for the general webmaster, it can be a scary situation. Google knows this and has taken steps to update their reconsideration documentation to make this task less daunting for new webmasters in this situation.

Google shared the news of the updated documentation on their Google+ page saying that the new documentation will now show “step-by-step information on how to submit a reconsideration request and the process behind reconsiderations.” Google added that “you can also find tips on how to document your request better and how to avoid potential pitfalls.”

The help page contains content around:

• How to submit a reconsideration request
• The process behind the reconsideration request
• What should be documented in your reconsideration request
• What elements can be found in a good reconsideration request
• Specific advice on specific actions, such as links, thin content and much more
• Also a few common reconsideration request pitfalls

This of course does not have anything to do with a site that does not have a manual action but is hit by an algorithmic penalty such as Penguin, Panda or many of the other spam algorithms.