One of my sites is the keyword for the "category" and is also very brandable. The best the domain has ever performed is in the top ten pages on Google. I really have never made much effort to move it up because the bulk of the traffic comes from type-in destination traffic. Nearly 75% of the visitors to this site type the name in and come directly to the site. I'm guessing Facebook and Google are similar.
I recently noticed my website was positioned on page 75 of Google results. I breezed over the guidelines and did the basics and submit a request for consideration.
Before I came across this letter, I have sent a second request only after completely cleaning up all related topics on all of Google's guidelines.
Here is my form letter response from Google:
Reconsideration request for http://DomainBrand.org/: No manual spam actions found November 29, 2011
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://DomainBrand.org/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://DomainBrand.org/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
So after making all the corrections I resubmit a new sitemap.xml and robots.txt. I also suggested to Google that after watching a video by one Mr. Lindley, I feel Google is stepping beyond their reach. I'll elaborate in a moment.
I'll post an update on this site and the rankings in a few days.
