If your website violates Google’s Webmaster Guidlines, then Google may penalise you with a filter (certain keywords will not rank), or ban the site altogether.

Two ways of checking whether you have been penalised are:

• Type in site:www.domainname.com into a Google search – If there are no pages indexed on your site, and the pages are not blocked by Google by robots, JavaScript etc then you may have an issue
• Copy some content for your site and search for it in Google – You should always appear first in Google for your content if it is unique. If you don’t rank for a paragraph of your content then again you may have been penalised

If you have checked the above and believe you have been penalised you will obviously need to get your pages back in their index as soon as possible. But first you will need to remove any issues on your site to ensure that the site is clean. As a rough guide you should check for the following:

• Hidden Text – Pretty obvious just simply check you are not hiding content from Google. Try disabling the style sheets or JavaScript and ensure that your site is not cloaking
• Over Optimisation – Use Yahoo or Majestic SEO to determine whether you have built up too many links over too short a time. For example obtaining 100’s of links in a matter of days will indicate to Google that you are buying links and could result in a ban
• Poor links – Check your link portfolio for poor links from 100’s of irrelevant sites, you should also check your links dont appear on any porn or gambling sites as they may have been blacklisted
• Content – Ensure all the content on your site is unique and not copied from other sources. Copied content from competitiors is a big no no.
• Over Optimised Link Portfolio – Check the anchor text of your links, if all the anchor text links are keywords then this again indicates link buying. Build some links around other areas of your site, or using your domain name as anchor text as this appears more natural

Once you have removed the offending material from your site you can then file for a reinclusion with Google.
To achieved this you should do the following:

1. Open a Google Webmaster Tools account and verify you are the site owner by uploading the verification file to your server. Without verification you will not be able to submit the request.

2. Once you are logged into the Webmaster Tools account go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration, select the site you wish to submit a reinclusion request for, then follow the on screen instructions. You should also inform Google what changes you have made to the site for them to reinclude the site.

It is very important you fix the issues and indicate this to Google, otherwise you are wasting their time. Google have stated that they forgive all sites that try to manipulate their results as long as they tidy the site up. I would not use this statement however as an indication of ‘try it till you get caught’ as Google will no doubt have a record of reinclusion requests in their database.

Another small tip is that if you wish to submit multiple reinclusion requests use different Webmaster Tools account. And for all those SEO companies out there don’t use your main account for this!.