So you have been sent to Google jail; an SEO worst nightmare, and Michael Scofield with a cake with a crowbar in it won’t cut it. For those who don’t know, Google jail is what happens to your site when Google has found it to be continually practising unethical SEO techniques (Black Hat techniques). You have been thrown out of the search engine result page the most common indicator of this, are that your page rank displays unranked or when you place “site:www.mysite.com ” into the search engine query box and it returns no results.

If you have got a new site don’t panic; the above doesn’t apply to you. If your site is not a new site then panic! So what do you do when this happens? Get on the phone and call us is my best recommendation, you really need to get an expert in these sorts of cases but for the DIY out there I will review the core of the process.

First off, you have to determine what caused your site to get banned. This is quite tricky but more often than not it, is likely that you have used some form of unethical methods on your site by accident, or on purpose. Google does discriminate; for more on this check out my blog on unethical methods.

Once you have discovered the cause; eliminate it. Then and only then, submit a reconsideration request to Google. To do this you will need a Google web-master tool account, this is an addition feature of any iGoogle account. Verify your ownership of the site by uploading a file to the site provided though web -master tools.

Then in the web-master tool dashboard go to Tools, then request reconsideration and follow the instructions. This is not a quick exercise as this is manually checked by Google and has been known to take up to a month plus; and even then you won’t receive the ranking you once had. My best recommendation is don’t get banned in the first place.