So we’ve looked at what the Google Minus 30 penalty is and how to identify it. Now, lets talk about how to resolve it.

1) First you have to fix the problems that were creating the penalty in the first place. Then email Google and say you’ve updated your site and ask for reinclusion to the index.

2) Create an HTML and XML sitemap for your website and submit it to Google. Creating a sitemap is a critical step because it serves a dual purpose; Google loves sitemaps and by creating one, it will help you examine the internal structure of your site, which can lead to discovering duplicate content, poor URL structure, redirect loops and generally show you, the webmaster, what your site looks like and what’s really going on.

Many sites looking at the Google Minus 30 penalty are database-driven sites whose HTML is created through a server-side scripting language like ASP or PHP. While there is no concrete evidence to support the idea that creating your site map with the same scripting language as your site is better, I believe its still a good idea for congruity, not to mention that creating your site map in the same language as your main site may allow you to discover problems more easily.

There are various free services for creating sitemaps and you can find sitemap standards at Sitemaps.org (as an aside, do a reverse lookup on the DNS and you’ll see the site is operated and owned by Google. Here are some free sitemap creation services:

http://sitemapxml.com/ (For sites with 2000 pages or less)

http://www.vigos.com/products/gsitemap/

3) Make sure you have a robots.txt file and that its created correctly; if you don’t have one, create a robots.txt file.   We use  /robots.txt files to give instructions about our websites to web spiders, making it easier for the search engines to spider your site.

When  a robot wants to vists a web site’s URL, say http://www.example.com/welcome.html, it firsts checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt, and if it finds the URL, it processes it quickly. Through command lines such as:

User-agent: *Disallow: / (The “User-agent: *” designation applies to all robots. The “Disallow: /” command tells the robot it isn’t allowed to visit any pages on the site.)

You can exclude pages of your site so they don’t get spidered by using commands like that above. However, this isn’t advisable as search bots don’t like these commands. Thus, consider avoiding command lines like those above altogether. If you still want to exclude pages on your site, think about building the limitations into the URL itself (e.g. permalinks).

Note: avoid Session IDs at all costs.

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An Introduction Google’s Minus 30 Penalty - Part 1

The Google Minus 30 Penalty - 5 Ways to Identify the Problem - Part 2