For example, just today, Donna and I had the following conversation:

dazzlindonna says: bought my $1 raffle ticket at the fair. lots of cool prizes (cash, furniture, tv, etc) but there’s one I really want to win – a Pink Camo Rifle – I mean, how cool would that be?
Michael VanDeMar says: heh!
Michael VanDeMar says: Great, if you’re trying to hide in a herd of flamingos!

See, I knew about the fair. I even knew that a Louisiana fair weren’t the same as most of the fairs I’ve been to (for instance, I had never even heard of cracklins before Donna explained to me what they are…). But a pink camo rifle…?

Well, ok. To each their own. So, Donna, just in case you don’t win, here’s what you would look like with one of those:

Enjoy!

The changes to the language in the Google Reconsideration Request (formerly known as the Reinclusion Request), that were discussed on SEO Scoop back on December 3rd and here on Smackdown again on the 18th, have finally gone through. Essentially, the changes have to do with lessening the accusatory tone of the request. Prior to the changes, even if you did nothing wrong, but your website got hit with an algorithmic penalty anyways, you still had to affirm and agree you did in fact violate Google’s guidelines in some way, shape, or form.

The last round of changes took out the first line you had to agree to, which stated, “I believe this site has violated Google’s quality guidelines in the past.”, leaving you with:

Which was good, but you basically still had to admit that you had in fact done something wrong in the past (again, even if you hadn’t). Now if you log in to Google Webmaster Tools and click on the Request Reconsideration link, you can see that they have completely reworded to, and it now reads:

Which is much more appropriate, in my opinion. Of course, that now means that the instructions for reconsideration are slightly out of sync with the wording on the form, but hey, who reads instructions anyways.

Thanks Matt! I know, you say all you did was drop them an email, but that of course had more of an effect than 100 emails would have done from the rest of us (ie, they actually read your emails! ).

I dumped text link ads. I nofollowed paid links. I javascripted links that might be mistaken for paid links. I canceled my sponsored review accounts. I switched to a different method of monetization (Scratchback) that serves Google-friendly, nofollowed links. (And btw, Google, that put a huge dent in my revenue, just so you know). – Donna Fontenot of SEO-Scoop.com

And yet still, they ask for more.

Personally, as you probably know, I’m with Michael Gray on this one… they have overstepped their bounds. They used to tout the fact that it was all algorithmically determined, and everything was completely automated (as was always their favorite fallback):

In search engines, a website’s fluctuation in the search results is a natural consequence of updating and maintaining the index. This means that some sites will be ranked higher than before for a particular keyword and others lower. In Google, these changes are completely automated and no changes can be made manually for particular cases.

(Cached version of the above quoted page can be found here.)

This stance of course offered them a very strong measure of insulation, in the form of “No, of course there was no bias, Your Honor… our proprietary algorithm is completely automated.” It was of course also a huge selling point for investors as well, since obviously with a dataset as large as theirs, any labor that can be performed by computer is much more cost effective than that which has to be done by hand.

Now that they have abandoned this particular company line, and are manually tweaking both the rankings and PageRank displays of the websites in their index, how will this affect their cases the next time someone brings them to court for unfair business practices?

I guess we will just have to wait and see.

Although he said that it could take a while, it looks like the changes Matt mentioned he started the ball rolling on, that DazzlinDonna posted about back on Dec 3rd, “Admission of Guilt Will No Longer Be Required For Google Reconsideration Request“, have indeed gone through. For the most part, that is.

There were 2 items Matt had asked to be changed. The first was to have removed the need to admit that you did something wrong in order to submit a reinclusion request (keeping it in there meant that it left no room for there to be a Google error, and people who honestly didn’t think they did anything wrong would have to admit to it anyways). The second change he asked for was to remove from the official Google Webmaster Guidelines the bit about how people hiring SEO firms or individuals should “insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantee.”

The second change has been fully completed. The old wording:

“For your own safety, you should insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantee. Don’t be afraid to request a refund if you’re unsatisfied for any reason, or if your SEO’s actions cause your domain to be removed from a search engine’s index.” – before

How it reads now:

“Don’t be afraid to request a refund if you’re unsatisfied with your SEO’s performance.” – after

Very nicely toned down from the whole “BEWARE OF SEO’S! DANGER!” message it used to have. I actually agreed with the bit that a firm should indeed be accountable if they perform changes that cause you to be deindexed… but the problem with enforcing that is you would need to be able to prove what exactly caused the loss of rankings/indexed pages, and to do that you would need Google to be willing to actually confirm some sort of causal relationship. Since there’s no way in hell that will happen, it’s probably best that they did just remove that bit as well.

The first change Matt promised us technically did happen, just not all the way. His exact statement:

“I dropped an email to someone at Google to request that we remove the text ‘I believe this site has violated Google’s quality guidelines in the past.’ from the checkbox in the reconsideration request form” – Matt Cutts

Which they did in fact do. The problem is that they left the remaining two bullet points worded so you still are left with the feeling that you indeed must have been naughty in the first place. Now what we see when we go there:

If something “no longer” does something, that inherently means that it “once did”. Close, though. I personally think that the following language would be much better:

• I have read and understand Google’s quality guidelines.
• This site does not currently violate Google’s quality guidelines.
• I agree to abide by Google’s quality guidelines in the future as well.

As far as I can tell, something like that should in fact cover all of the bases.

There. Don’t you feel smarter already?

Now, on a COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE…