http://www.tigertom.com has been re-indexed by Google. I found a site giving advice on how to do a re-inclusion request.
1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to http://www.google.com, typing ‘site:www.yourdomain.com’ without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages …
2. You check Google’s webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not really guidelines; you should treat them as iron-clad rules.
3. You stop the offending content from being ‘bot’ or web-accessible, permanently.
If you’re familiar with Apache web-server mod_rewrite you can:
– Send a 410 ‘Gone’ response to requests for the offending pages, or
– CHMOD them to 600, which will return a 403 ‘Forbidden’ response, or
– Move them to a different directory if you need to keep them, or
– Just delete them.
Don’t try to be clever. Just get rid of them.
2. You go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py and type ‘re-inclusion request’ in the subject box.
3a. You add the complete URL of your site i.e. http://www.naughtydomain.com,
3b. You state that you have read the webmaster guidelines above,
3c. You admit what you did wrong; simply, succinctly, with no carping or special pleading.
Don’t try to be clever. Don’t lie.
Google has cached copies of your site. When an engineer checks your
site, he’ll look for the offending content, and compare it against
their cache. He’ll spend a maximum of two minutes on it; don’t give him a reason to continue to exclude you.
4. You ask for re-inclusion.
5. You wait.
In my case, it took about a week. I sent follow up emails, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that didn’t work. That was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that’s all that should be necessary.
They sent a standard reply saying the ‘problem had been passed to their engineers’. That’s good. I understand they send no reply to spammers.
A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To make sure I’m not so vulnerable again, I’m splitting my content to:
http://www.ttfreeware.co.uk
http://www.ttmoney.co.uk
http://www.ttconservatories.co.uk
http://www.ttwindows.co.uk
http://www.ttkitchens.co.uk and of course
http://www.ttblog.co.uk!
I’ll probably put up more sites, too, on the principle ‘best not to have all your eggs in one basket’.
The reason my sites were banned was because they had pseudo-directory pages with links being run through a re-direct script. This is a hallmark of an ‘Adsense scraper’* site, which Google is trying to filter from its ‘SERPs’**
* A site specifically set up to host Google Adsense advertisements http://www.google.com/adsense. Ususally of low quality, consisting of links to other web sites, text copied from free-print articles, and a Google skyscraper ad block near the top.
** Search Engine Result Pages