About a month ago, I emailed google to ask them why my site hasn't been listed even when it was 4 weeks old, and I was shocked when I got this reply: DATE APRIL 3, 2006 Hi XXX, Thank you for your reply. Please note that your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. Please read our Webmaster Guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html for more information. Regards, The Google Team I then explained that I hadn't done anything wrong, no cloaking, hidden text, etc, just a few link exchanges for traffic. I also sent a reinclusion request. I then got this message: Thank you for your reply. We appreciate your efforts to comply with Google's quality standards. We have sent your request on to our engineering team who will review your site to determine if it is eligible for re-inclusion. If the website is reinstated, it will appear in Google's search results sometime in the next few months. We appreciate your patience during this process. I was thinking the reinclusion would take 4-5 months, so I just gave up hope and frogot about it. Today (May 6), when I checked the logs, I found a few visits comming from google! I even typed my domain in to make sure it was really reindexed. Reinclusion does work guys, and it was reincluded in a month!
Thats great to hear. Was there something you needed to fix to be reincluded? Was there something on your site that you were doing wrong? What caused you to be banned in the first place?
Yeah it seems that you are not being forthcoming in saying what put you in the ban area. Please elaborate.
They wouldn't tell me why I was banned, and I was guessing it was cause I was running YPN on my site, then I remembered I had a few link exchanges, which may be the reason why it got banned. I had all the links to the banned site removed from my other sites and removed some outgoing links on the site before I requested a reinclusion. This is probably the reason they unbanned me. My site is actually ranking pretty high now on some keywords
I actually noticed that several of my own sites became unbanned as well. Im not sure if this is conincidence but I do believe something went on at Google in a big way last week with regards to lifting bans on sites. I had 2 go back up the same day that were doing well on everythign except for google. Just my 2 cents.