Banned in Google? Delisted in Yahoo? Bounced from Bing?
Learn how to get back in.
A reinclusion request is exactly what the name implies. You are humbly beseeching the search engine's forgiveness. If you're like most people, this request is going to Google, but it is not uncommon for Yahoo and Bing to also throw people out of their listings, either for overt violations or subtle infractions that may not even be deliberate. Search engines penalize spamming, fraud, malware distribution, and the dissemination of illegal material online. They also will penalize sites that pretend to be one thing but really aren't. For instance, if you tell a search engine that your site is about stamp collecting, but you present visitors with a pill site, then you are cloaking, and the search engines won't take too long to catch on. Every once in awhile, a search engine will do a manual review of certain sites, and you may get taken out of the results if you obviously don't belong there.
How do you get back in? You file reinclusion requests. Here's where to file them:
In Google, go to Google Webmaster Tools, verify your site, and file from there. The good thing about webmaster tools is that they will put a prominent warning in the site info if you're banned, so if you don't see anything you may just have bad SEO.
For Yahoo (while it still is present its own results, and not those of Bing) you can go to Help Central. Note that this URL has changed a few times and may change again.
What do you tell the engines when you're filling out the form? A somewhat dated post from Search Engine Watch is still helpful. In a nutshell, you're apologizing and simultaneously blaming someone else, since the search engines like to hear the specific names of SEO companies that have been peddling banned techniques. Every once in awhile a whole set of sites associated with an SEO company will be pulled from the index. If you bought a domain and found out that it was banned before you got it, tell the search engines that it is yours now. Part of the online rumor mill believes that a ban becomes part of a site's history, so try not to pull anything with that particular site again.
Above all else, you should really fix the problems with the site before submitting a request. If you're sending out viruses, you have to fix this right away. If you're spamming the search engines, they don't even need a human being to see that it is still happening. If you bought sitewide text links, take them down! If you're selling links and got caught, you might as well stop because your customers will soon notice your gray pagerank bar and the loss of value from your links anyway. If you don't know (and webmaster tools is fairly vague when it tells you that you're violating its quality guidelines) then you need the help of a search engine optimization consultant. For instance, you may have old code on the site that's tripping a penalty. One of our sites had an index.htm and an index.html, and the htm was just an affiliate link. People got to the right pages, but the search engines didn't, and our site got banned for a year. An SEO professional should be able to diagnose the cause of a ban fairly quickly, but you have a duty to be honest about what you've done. In one case we had a customer who had bought services from a rogue SEO firm, and his site was banned, but he didn't tell us that. In another we found that the customer used CSS to place content about a quarter mile (literally) outside the viewable frame of the browser window. His printer ink business dried up in a hurry when he was taken out of the results. We have seen old doorway pages, inadvertent cloaking, accidental linking schemes, and other unfortunate cases, plus a few cases where people were just trying to be crooks and trick the search engines. Some of these people can't be helped. If you wandered into a grey (or black hat) area and got stung, you still have hope, but you have to remove the offending stuff first, or the search engine reinclusion request will be dismissed with extreme prejudice.
Notes and Special Information
Special note: Not all reinclusion requests are successful. You might have done something really wrong, or the person who sold you the site did.