What is a re-inclusion request? It involves the process of removing a penalty imposed on a site usually for violating Google's guidelines. Sometimes a site is penalized so that it will not rank well for search queries related to the site. There are other times when a site is removed completely from Google's index. Matt Cutts gives some practical advice on how to go about requesting re-inclusion after your site has experienced a penalty.

His first bit of advice is to take a long hard look at your site to discover if anything has been done that might have earned it a penalty. Hidden text, hidden links, cloaking, doorway pages, JavaScript redirection, automated link building and Google scraping are some of the things he mentions. Before making a re-inclusion request, the very thing that earned the penalty in the first place must be fixed. If it is not, then you will be wasting your time requesting re-inclusion.

Now, where to send the request? You used to send an email to help@google.com but now they have a web form located at http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py. When sending your request for re-inclusion, Google wants to know two things: 1) that any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and 2) that it’s not going to happen again. Matt says, "I’d recommend giving a short explanation of what happened from your perspective: what actions may have led to any penalties and any corrective action that you’ve taken to prevent any spam in the future."

After this you wait and wait and then wait some more. Sometimes a penalty can be lifted quickly while other times it can be a back and forth process. As one that has experience in getting penalties lifted not only for client sites but one of my own, I can tell you that "honesty" and "patience" are crucial. I have seen re-inclusions occur within a few weeks while others have taken a year. Of course the best thing to do is to try to avoid doing anything that will incur a penalty in the first place. You can read the full post as well as comments here.