Sorry for the delay in transcribing Matt Cutts' videos. This one was originally posted on Matt's blog on August 7th (Video: Reinclusion Requests) while we were all in San Jose. The transcript is verbatim below;  I'll italicize and bracket my personal comments.

Reinclusion requests

This is Matt and Emmy coming to you Thursday after hockey at the Googleplex [here Matt is stroking his fluffy cat and sounding eerily calm; I've taken a screen cap and posted it below].

 


Yesh, you’re a good cat.

Let’s talk reinclusion requests. I did a blog post about reinclusion requests a while ago; the procedure has changed a little bit, though. Imagine if you’ve spammed or someone that you’ve hired as a webmaster has spammed, and you’re now no longer in Google. What do you do now?

 

The best thing that I would recommend [he makes kissy faces at the cat. I'm allergic to cats, so this whole exchange is making me itchy and uncomfortable] is to register in Sitemaps, that’s our Webmaster console, or Webmaster Central, whatever you want to call it [obviously Webmaster Central was just launched, so he's trying to figure out what to call it in order to avoid confusion]. It’s basically the place where you can get all kinds of information.

Sometimes you can even find out if you have penalties on your site. We can’t show all the penalties that we have just because that will clue in malicious spammers as well, but if they’re real [he says "Yes" again to his cat] legit sites that have valid [he giggles because the cat's tail is in the way...and I'm itchy again], valid content, good girl [I'm assuming that comment is directed towards me for doing such a kick ass job at transcribing his videos, so thank you, Matt!], we want them to be able to be found.

We can show penalties for some sites. [The cat hops off his lap, and I can breathe again].  So, if you do have a penalty, or if you suspect that you might have a penalty, go ahead and register in Sitemaps, and then fill out a reinclusion request. I think it’s in the bottom left, or something like that. The more information you can give, the better. For example, if you were using an SEO or somebody that your webhost got hacked, whatever, you know, give as much specifics as you can.

You also might want to give some sort of timeline, or "Here’s what was going on, here’s the mistake we made." The most important thing is Google needs to know that…it’s not going to happen again. So, some way of letting us know or convincing us that whatever you think the problem was, usually you might have a pretty clear idea of something like hidden text, doorway pages, sneaky redirects using javascript, anything like that, we need to know that those pages, those violations of our quality guidelines, are not going to come back.

So, that’s the procedure I would go with. Try to include as much detail as possible about how it might have happened and what you’re going to do to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and then that goes into a queue that we check and try to find out, "Okay, has the hidden text been removed," stuff like that. Reinclusion requests definitely get looked at by people, and that’s the procedure I would recommend to use to put one in.