Very soon, you’ll no longer have to confess to being a sinner in order to use Googles re-inclusion or reconsideration request ( I suspect it’ll be called the take me off the naughty list next week, being xmas and all that)
This is a good thing, a small thing, but a good thing nonetheless. Anything that allows you to challenge without putting you on the back foot from the off, can’t be bad, can it?
Whilst Google are probably of the view that it’s an easy thing to do and even almost a no brainer for them to implement, you do nonetheless find yourself wondering why they employed the whole nasty evil language approach from the outset.
Still, at least now if you find yourself with a white bar or an inability to rank, you can just toodle along to the webmaster tool page and make a bit of a tool of yourself and ask to be let back in, without admitting guilt! Yay! Um…they’ll probably ignore you or leave you where you were at, but at least you get to ask without fessing up! 
Seriously - it’ll be a good thing if people get feedback, like ‘no dude you have a paid post on blogpost number 234 of your 1500 that you’ve made’ …don’t you agree? Shouldn’t it be a two way process?
I suspect that there’s a strand of thought that runs through the plex of ‘aaaargh, it’s one of those evil bastard spammers asking for some feedback on their evil wicked spammy ways’, and that this might just contribute to a view of ‘let em stew’. But hey, I’ve been wrong once if not a thousand times. I’m sure I’ll be wrong again. 
Did this help? Do you agree? I value opinions, why not tell me what you think below!
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Colm @ SEO Ireland - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 5th, 2007 at 11:40 amfor some reason Google dropped one of my sites from the index for no reason it’s a 100% clean wordpress blog, anyway I used the webmaster tools and 2 weeks later back in the index….but I’ve no idea why it was dropped in the first place…and I guess wil never know
robwatts - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 5th, 2007 at 6:56 pmHi Colm
Good to see you got back in there, nice to hear of a reinclusion request working…unless maybe it was for soemthing completely unrelated and coincidences collided
Don’t forget that what we sometimes think we are seeing isn’t necessarily what it seems.Old indices, data refreshes, data centre downtime, internal experiments etc can all contribute to a perception that may lead us to believe that a site has been dropped or penalised when in reality it might not necessarily be so.
There’s a lot of clamour for webmaster tools to reveal more info, especially with regard to some of the ’sins’ considered not to fall in any egregious spam category. Such a revelation would be very useful in getting to the bottom of any potential problems a whole lot quicker, especially if those problems were of an algorithmic bent.
Some say that thisd would be a bad thing of course, as it would tell the naughty spammers thst the game was up freeing them to work on new spammy projects. Whereas a process of continual frustration might keep them occupied with their existing rubbish.
Of course saying all that is kind of neglectful to the fact that most SEO’s worth their salt these days can spot a search engine pen from 50 paces! A site that can’t rank for its name is pretty indictative, an empty site: command, inability to rank for unique titles, inconsistant ranking ability for the odd red herring pages etc etc. Although in an ever evolving search world, I’m sure those search guys will keep us all guessing with new variants on the theme! Da woncurs
YC - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 13th, 2007 at 11:22 amHey Rob, any sure way to know for sure whether a penalty is in place? It appears that I might have to remove my google rant lol after a recent development this week…
robwatts - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 13th, 2007 at 2:28 pmHi YC, what gives you the impression you are penalised? site: shows you well indexed and your pages are being returned for 2 word query strings as well as your domain name…are you talking toolbar?
Generally speaking, you can be pretty sure you have a penalty of sorts if you find that you can’t rank for a string that you know is unique to your site and is from a page that you know to be indexed. Sometimes you’ll find these pages appear on the 3rd or 4th page of a SERP, which when you think of it is a pretty good sign that you did something that they didn’t agree with.
FWIW, I don’t think they mind if you rant and rail at them too much, at least that’s been my experience.
They are pretty good at making examples of people, especially when they are trying to make a point and wish to gain maximum reach for their message. The recent text links advertising nofollow thing was one such example.
Hope that helps!
YC - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 13th, 2007 at 2:35 pmThanks for the feedback, Rob! I’ve checked SERPs and yes they’re fine. Just that I’ve noticed PR all zilch since the start of the week - I reckon it could be a glitch but unsure if it lasts so long. If not, then it’s from a previous 4.
robwatts - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 13th, 2007 at 2:48 pmAh PR zilch is prolly a paid links or paid review pen or maybe just a little data centre reversion perhaps, it does happen, unlikey in this case, but it happens.
There hasn’t been a lot of evidence of these pR0 type pens affecting SERP performance..yet, so if you aren’t overly bothered by it then you could just ignore it and carry on regardless. That said, there has been some discussion around them taking further action for non compliant sites so this could well be a possibility in the future. I guess that ultimately it all boils down to how important search engine traffic is to you. If it matters and you are still doing the paid link/review dofollow thing then it is something to consider.
YC - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 13th, 2007 at 2:51 pmYeah SERP is important to me as I do get nice hits from there. I suppose I have to grin and bear it, wave the white flag and kowtow to the big G. It’s a love-hate relationship.
Ginger - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 14th, 2007 at 10:02 pmI have to wonder, though, if the loss of PR was kind of a warning shot, and the real penalties will come later. As much as I like the idea of small-time personal bloggers being able to make a decent income online, I definitely agree that sponsored posts can be supremely irritating. At one point, I was looking for some kind of feedback on the quality of a particular website’s services. Instead of legit feedback, I found about 40 blogs with PayPerPost badges and overly positive reviews. I guess the joke is on the advertiser, though, because I ended up going with a different service for that exact reason.
Andy Beard - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 18th, 2007 at 6:03 pmGlad to see you got your pixels back, and a 2 way conversation would be appreciated, and could probably have avoided many of the problems Google now face.
The new version isn’t quite as “innocent” as would have been hoped for
http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2007/12/18/matt-cutts-comes-through-well-mostly/
robwatts - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 18th, 2007 at 9:19 pmHey Andy, as Bruce Forsyth would say nice 2 c u 2 c u nice.
Agreed new version isn’t any better. What was originally implield still applies. Amazing really!
It speaks volume…Seo we love you…not
Matt - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 19th, 2007 at 6:36 amWould be nice if they explained why they man handled some blogs but in reality that would be a lot of resources to individually tell everyone…I guess indirectly it tells you to not sell posts and whatnot..but like you said if you have one paid post on a 5542 page that they dont like it’s going to be a bitch to find and correct.
Sixkiller - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 21st, 2007 at 8:44 pmMaybe because on Christmas everyone is more good they let the sinners to ask for redemption without confessing
I’m quite a newbie of this stuff, I know that google may penalize blogs with paid posts but I wonder if they are allowed when clearly stated that it’s a sponsored post. Or maybe with a sitewide disclosure. Cutting paid posts or advertisement in general, if done politely obviously, may be a bad thing for blog who gains a lot of support from ad money.
robwatts - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
December 23rd, 2007 at 4:00 pm@Matt - Yes, the lesson being that PR exercises take all manner of forms, with affected vocalisation a predictable side effect!
@SixKiller - I only ever did one paid post on this blog - it was probably sufficient to attract a site wide pixel pen. I have an open disclosure policy too http://www.yackyack.co.uk/disclosure-policy/ .
@ Ginger (sorry I missed your earlier comment) I agree that some blog posts add little value serp wise, yet if they point to a valued resource then I can see why some might argue that they add value; at least in the sense of pointing towards an on topic resource that is in the business of the keyterms they aspire too. That said, publically at least, Google and other SE’s can’t really leave such things to go unchallenged as this would add credence to a view that SERPs are relatively simple to manipulate and more importantly aren’t really ‘free’ at all, as money (via a 3rd party advertising route) is directly influencing their outcome.
There are indeed a lot of overlaps with this stuff and a lot of business models and mystery to be maintained!
Becky @ PreBlogging - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
January 8th, 2008 at 1:04 pmI’ve just gotten my pagerank back, after a white December. They knocked me down to PR0/10 and now I am back to my happy PR3/10.
Funny thing was I didn’t sell posts, but I did refer people to PPP and had the PPP code in my blog. So am I blaming PPP, YES !
robwatts - Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
January 8th, 2008 at 7:38 pmHey Becky, so they gave you a white christamas huh?
Bing Crosby anyone 
That’s interesting Becky - I think it a little unfair to blame PPP though! Hardly their fault that Google doesn’t like their business model!
Thanks for stopping by