Note: Please feel free to vote in my current Poll on the right

Offline, if someone sabotages our business which results in a complete loss of earnings and our sole source of income gone overnight typically we have some recourse in seeking damages. However with online business, and especially one’s which rely heavily on traffic from search engines such as Google if this happens we are virtually ruined.

The only official link between your problem and a solution lies in the form of a “Reinclusion Request” in which you have to bow your head in shame, admit wrong doing then click a button and wait hoping a stranger possibly on the other side of the planet is having a good day and has an ounce of compassion while your families livelihood is on the line.

What if that Email doesn’t even get read?

I’m doing a Poll on peoples opinion to see if they believe the Reinclusion Request even works. I’ve read many stories on forums and blogs of people hanging on with hope several months down the road, with great content sites completely tanked and everyone scratching their heads wondering why it doesn’t rank. One of them was even that good i bookmarked it because i knew i would never find it on Google.

I do not believe reinclusion requests are even read and here’s why:

I purchased i domain name from the TDNAM aftermarket, it was a perfect name for the site i wanted to build and i ran some basic checks such as looked it up on Archive.org, Google’d it to see if it was involved in spamming and so on and the only less than ideal red flag was that the domain wasn’t indexed but i figured no-biggie if it’s been 404 and/or parked recently that’s pretty normal.

I won the auction, excellent so i paid a designer to make me a unique design fully branded for my new domain and set about building content for it. A week later and with much lighter pockets i started uploading my new site, code, graphics and content found nowhere else on the net and it looked stunning.

I hand submitted it to several of the more reputable free directories, i wrote 3 unique articles and submitted them to Ezine Articles with my site link in the Bio. Shortly after i went away for 10 days due to a family problem, and when i returned the first thing i done was check it’s stats which were less than stellar. Googlebot had made 0 hits while Yahoo and MSN were in the 100’s, so i looked it up on Google and nothing i couldn’t be found.

Weeks went by, i put my link in a couple of forum signature i have visited for years and due to that a couple of people linked to me from their site referencing a particular article i done and one was even a Google Pagerank 7 so i figured i should be indexed soon surely.

More weeks went by and i realized i wasn’t going to be indexed, the domain was banned. I done some more checking using Yahoo and my domain had a link in the footer of a portal along with about 20 other similar domains, mine was say RedWidgets and they also linked to BlueWidgets, GreenWidgets and so on so i realized it must of been part of a network and was banned.

I tried to contact the portal site owner using the Whois address, and the contact form to ask him to remove the link but no reply.

I filed a reinclusion request, stating i bought the domain from a TDNAM auction and linked to the auction as it had the time and date the auction ended. I also linked to the Whois on DomainTools as it showed the last update on the domain and i also pasted in the TDNAM receipt details of the transaction.

I told them it’s never been indexed since i bought it, and i believe it was part of a network as it’s got a link on a portal with similar domains but despite a number of attempts i can’t get the link removed so could they please devalue or ignore that link somehow.

Well here we are 1 year later, my domain never did get indexed and i let it expire. A total of $700 in design down the drain and 100’s of hours writing content until my fingers started to bleed.

Nobody can tell me Google reads reinclusion requests, Googlebot didn’t visit the domain so there was clearly a problem before i purchased it. I provided ample “evidence” i was the new owner of the domain, and it was apparent to anybody a lot of work went in to the site and it was completely original right from the fully valid XHTML & CSS design to the content on the pages.

The other time i have used a reinclusion request, same thing nothing was done. You can read more about that under The Impact of User Feedback.

So please vote in my poll, what do you feel about reinclusion requests if you have filed one before? Feel free to comment if you also had a similar experience.