You may or may not have heard about Google Reconsideration Requests. If you run a website then you are probably obsessed with your rankings on Google and if your sites rankings suddenly nose dive then you may well wonder what you can do it about it. This is where a reconsideration request comes in. It allows you to contact Google directly and explain what you believe has happened to your site and to ask that it be looked into. You can think of a Google reconsideration request as a support ticket.

Before you can submit a reconsideration request to Google you first have to be registered with Google Webmaster Tools and added and verified your website. By registering with Google Webmaster Tools you will get a whole host of information from Google about the general health of your website. This will sometimes help you identify issues regarding your website that you will be able to fix yourself such as issues with your sitemap.

Once you have cleaned up your site then you may want to let Google know that you have made changes and this is where the reconsideration request comes in. You can complete a form with details of what you believe the issue has been and the steps that you have taken to rectify the issue and ask for your site to be looked at again.

Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesperson on all pretty much everything technical, has just released a video in which he explains the reconsideration process. In it he says that there are three possible outcomes:

• Yes – this means your site is in good shape and the request has been granted
• No – this means the issue has not been dealt with
• We have processed your reconsideration request – this means some issues have been dealt with but there are still others that have not been rectified

The first two are easy to deal with but the third can leave you scratching your head as Google does not expand to tell you what the issues are that still need to be dealt with. Remember I said earlier that a reconsideration request is like a support ticket? Well it is but it may seem that it has gone to the unhelp desk. I have read a lot of complaints from site owners who complain that Google does not provide them with enough information to allow them to make the necessary amendments to regain their rankings.

However, Google is not really there for site owners it is really the site users that keep Google going. Yes, site owners are the ones who pay for the advertising on Google but they only pay because they know that Google is the most popular search engine in the world. The reason that it is the most popular search engine is because they consistently provide the best results to users. If Google tells you the deeper secrets of their algorithm then site owners will start gaming the algorithm to gain higher rankings with low quality websites.

In the video Matt also explains the time frames that you can expect after submitting a reconsideration request. Generally they should be less than a week but if there has been a major change in the algorithm, such as the Panda and Penguin updates, then this response time is likely to be longer. It will rarely take longer than two weeks and if it does Matt suggests resubmitting the request as it is possible that something has gone wrong with the original form submission.

I hope that you never need to use a reconsideration request, but if you do find that your search engine rankings have dropped at least you know that there is a mechanism in place to help restore things. So make sure that you sign up for Google Webmaster Tools today!