I took the first few steps towards reinclusion into Google for one of my websites today. As you know, my two biggest websites were hit with huge Google penalties resulting in thousands of indexed pages just disappearing from the SERPs.

I had already removed Text Link Ads from both sites. This morning I worked on cleaning up site #1. I removed several links that contain ‘questionable material’ and added nofollow tags to several others.

After that was complete, I went ahead and sent Google a letter asking for reinclusion. I stated what I had done wrong, and the steps I took to fix the issue. According to Matt Cutts, it can take up to 6-8 weeks for sites with severe penalties to be reincluded. I would think that my penalties count as ’severe’ because I lost so many pages, I didn’t just lose a few or drop in rankings. They were completely wiped out.

I also am going to add Google Analytics to my sites, instead of just using Statcounter. Maybe Google likes sites running analytics better. Hopefully this helps some. I’ll be sure to keep everyone posted on the progress of my sites.