What do I have to pay attention to in a Reconsideration Request?

If you want to submit a Reconsideration Request because of a manual penalty by Google, you should take a number of things into consideration.

When submitting a request for another website review, you should be able to put forward a detailed report of what you did. This report should contain the following 6 points:

  1. admit that you breached the guidelines and give an open and believable statement that you will not do it again.
  2. how did the violation come to be? Was it your fault or someone else’s?
  3. what was done to correct the violation?
  4. how can you prove that you corrected the violation?
  5. did you really do everything in your power to take care of the source(s) of the violation?
  6. how can you prove this?

Additionally, you have to convince Google that another violation against their quality guidelines will not happen again.

  1. Which steps did you take to make sure that a violation will not happen again?
  2. can you prove this?

If your proof consists of, for example, lists of removed links or contacted webmasters, Google recommends submitting this information as a Google Doc or Google Spreadsheet and adding the link to said document to the Reconsideration Request.

Video explanation by Matt Cutts on the subject of Reconsideration Requests

Additional information about this topic:

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