Actually, here is an idea, although maybe not any more scalable than anything else but here goes anyway,,,

A webmaster’s site tanks, they come to the Google Webmaster Help forum and pose the problem. If after everyone diligently working on the problem, no one finds anything obvious, which I think most of us would find things with spammers’ or black-hat sites, the problem is escalated to someone who can peer into Google’s algo crystal ball and give ideas as to what areas are problematic.

An example of this that I think worked well, although maybe took longer than maybe it should have, is Sam I Am’s website. We all wracked our brains looking for anything and everything and the real problem turned out to be something that almost no one had imagined.

A Googler then steps in and gives a general overview of the problems, Sam I Am and his brother then go off and do the work that is needed. In the trade off we end up with a new and valuable member of the GWMH forum in Sam I Am who may not be the forum whore that some of us are but often seems to help out at just the right time.

Could something like this work?

No disrespect Matt but that’s a bit of a cop out, there’s nothing stopping a black hat or spammer setting up a network of sites and adding a dash of cloaking, .edu spam etc and probing how much they could “get away with” before being shot down.

No difference, by not having some sort of re inclusion feedback it effects legitimate people trying to do the right thing more than anyone.

I just submitted a re inclusion request after my site vanished 2 weeks ago for an unknown reason. It went from xx,xxx visitors per day mainly from Google powered search to about 10 a day in a matter of 5 minutes.

The worst part is, i finished my last day of my offline job on the Friday to become a full time webmaster solely because my site just started breaking the $400 per day mark via Google Adsense. On the Sunday my traffic was killed off completely leaving me with no source of income what so ever.

Now i’m left sitting here praying my re inclusion message in a bottle i sent out gets to someone before i cannot afford to eat.

I don’t sell/exchange text links and i couldn’t give a hoot about PageRank and nobody can find anything wrong with my site and it’s believed to be a glitch.

So i feel sick after reading the Adsense “Success Stories” and how it changes peoples lives… Well i can definitely say it changed my life just 48 Hours after becoming a full time publisher.

Anyhow back to the topic.. Please Matt something needs to be done about the re inclusion process, put yourself in my shoes. Something eventuating from this re inclusion request means the difference between loosing things like my house and internet connection or being able to live my life as it was before all this happened.

It’s breaking me scouring the net all day long trying to work out “what else can i do”.

Your proposed, more-scalable solution says when a reinclusion request is denied, Google should say “no,” and refer the user to their guidelines … but you aren’t actually suggesting that the onus is on Google to research the site page by page to find each violation of their rules for inclusion. It sounds like the main difference between that and what actually happened is that Google assumes anyone asking to be reincluded probably already knows about their guidelines…?

Also, Google is a private, for-profit company, and not a public utility. Page rank ( especially the toolbar variety ) isn’t something we’re owed for having web sites. Google would be within its legal rights to reset a site’s PR to zero because one of their employees doesn’t like its template; their stance on paid links and such hasn’t been a secret for the past several years.

It’s unfortunate it took several weeks and a public spectacle for your friend to get her ad value back. But does Google really owe a site that’s broken their terms of service repeatedly more haste than they would have for any other web site?

In fact from my observations over the years I think the lack of transparency, along with initally vague webmaster guidelines (now fixed), have caused many if not most of the spam problems as both spammers and regular web folks vie to push the limits of the rules while staying in Google’s good graces. The big problem now is the profound inconsistency in the way sites are indexed, and the fact that it’s very difficult for webmasters to get much feedback from Google. Google would be well advised to consider better automated or customer pays routines to examine websites for problems and allow reinclusion, because the frustration is building more than they realize in the webmaster and small business community.

I do, however, think that obvious and well known issues such as simple HTML hidden text could be notified without threatening the integrity of the spam detection algorithm, but I guess even that would then possibly give the blackhats info about the approx time it takes an infraction to be detected.. sigh..

This is a particularly tricky problem for Google.

Second, no one with a clear-cut issue should be left guessing. Did they simply overlook something? Google should make that information available. If it’s a case of borderline violations, or borderline detection methods, Google can be more obscure so that spammers don’t abuse the feedback.

Third, there are Google AdWords certified professionals, why not Google SERPs reinclusion certified professionals? Google can provide them more advanced tools or have the relevant Google employees interact with them. Part of ongoing certification could be to help an assigned case a few times per year pro bono.

And when Google changes their policy, they need to provide a single, clear document on the policy, and tools and to allow compliance, all in ADVANCE. No one should be left interpreting and interpretation of something Matt Cutts said on video in order to determine details of Google’s policies.

And last, on Google should not provide methods or tools that CAUSE sites to be penalized. Explanation:

My least read blog (on blogspot) recently lost all Google traffic when I changed the blogspot template. Almost certainly a duplicate content penalty, as I didn’t have any posts sorted by topic before, and now do (and not using any suspicious page elements, etc.) Google traffic dropped to zero within a couple hours of changing the template, and has remained at zero for weeks since. So Google killed my Google results. Pages are still “indexed,” so reinclusion is not an issue, but sending 0-0-0 for traffic.

I just don’t see how things would scale at all in any type of situation. I’m also not understanding the idea of giving a blackhat all the tools they need in order to get re-included…(NOT talking about this particular case at all), but talking about this issue in general of Google giving correspondence like this to everyone.

Hasn’t it always been the case that if a site owner knows they did something against the guidelines, that the site owner is responsible for a “total” cleanup?

I just don’t know what to say. How does our SEO industry expect Google or any employee to email back and forth with any type of owner who did not follow the guidelines?

I’m at a loss with this. I really am. It shouldn’t matter who did what and when; if you violate guidelines you should fix things first.

Second, third, and even fourth and fifth chances?

My, oh my.

Feedback has to be given in such a way that it can’t be used in an iterative process to decipher where the lines are. Obviously there is some human element to it as well as I’ve seen people who’ve gotten very specific messages telling them where hidden text was located, which surprised me.

I don’t have the exact answer but I just feel like there is more that could be done. I’m trying to step away from the forums, blogs, and SEM social sites and look at the issue through the eyes of a site owner of a single site owner, and for them the current process is akin to sending a message in a bottle, you don’t know if it got anywhere.

On the other side of it I know the troubles of trying to deal with spammers. In my own personal experience I’ve learned that you cannot judge a site solely on the information given on the site. Often people post with problems for a given site that on the surface seem quite benign, but before helping them out I’ll check the history. With my limited tools I’ll often find that the site owner has A LOT of experience pushing the envelope on other properties, at that point I have to make a judgement call of my own. Do I help them get this one particular site back in or do I resist so as to not further their shadier tendencies? False link profiles, dozens of thin affiliate sites, scraper aggregators, etc. are just some of the rather obvious stuff I can find, and I don’t have the wonderful data mining tools that Google has.

I was hesitant to post this at first as I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t want to have Matt out there helping people, as I do, but it’s an issue that I feel strong about. For me helping the silent majority who isn’t quite as vocal and doesn’t have a voice in the blogosphere or the search engine circles because frankly, they don’t know they exist, is a cause worth forwarding.

In the end, hopefully Matt continues his public efforts, but also I hope I at least registered a vote for the cause to find a way to help the non-hardcore spammers and those without many connections. Great strides have been made in that direction but I don’t think we are quite there yet.

Thanks Matt for adding to my discussion.

But I should have added in my comments on Donna’s situation something like “The webmaster help group is more scalable to identify problems that I am.”