Google Reconsideration Request Builder
Answer questions about your manual action and what you have actually fixed. It tells you plainly whether you are ready to submit, and will not draft a request its own answers say is likely to be denied.
Build A Request A Reviewer Can Say Yes To
Pick the notice you received, answer a few questions about what you have fixed, and add the numbers. If your answers show the work is not finished, the builder says so instead of drafting a request that is likely to be denied.
- Two kinds of manual action come up most in cannabis: thin or scaled content, and unnatural links, often both at once.
- The builder asks what you actually fixed, tells you plainly whether you are ready, and will not draft a request its own answers say is likely to be denied.
- Remediation on a mid sized chain runs four to eight weeks. The request is the last step, not the first.
01 Cannabis Sites Get Hit From Two Directions At Once
Most industries have one dominant manual action risk. Cannabis has two, and both trace back to the same structural fact: paid advertising is closed to you on the major platforms. That one constraint shapes how dispensary marketing behaves, and it pushes operators toward the exact behaviors Google penalizes.
Because you cannot buy visibility with ads, you cover every market with location pages, and at scale those pages drift toward a template. And because you cannot buy visibility with ads, you buy links instead, the other lever available when the obvious one is switched off. In Search Console they arrive as Thin content with little or no added value or Major spam problems, which Google says covers scaled content abuse, and as Unnatural links to your site. It is common to see a dispensary carrying risk on both fronts at once.
This page covers what the builder needs from you. The full manual action recovery guide walks the whole project, from the first day to the submission.
02 The Content Side: Thin And Scaled
Thin content with little or no added value and scaled content abuse are closely related findings. On a dispensary chain they usually describe the same set of pages. Dozens of location pages, built from one template, differing only by city name and address. To the team that shipped them it looked systematic. To a reviewer it looks like pages produced to rank rather than to help anyone. The similarity checker measures how close your set sits to that reading.
There is a cannabis specific aggravating factor that many recoveries miss. If your product menu loads inside an iframe or through JavaScript, the unique content on each page may never reach Google. Strip the menu out and what remains is the templated wrapper. That is why dispensary pages often read far thinner than the team believes. Rewriting the wrapper without fixing the menu delivery means the pages stay thin, the request gets denied, and the team concludes Google is being unreasonable when the real problem was never touched.
A credible content recovery has three outcomes across the affected set, not one.
Rewritten From Local Facts
Pages for real stores get rebuilt from real store detail: parking, landmarks, named staff, what that branch carries differently. Not reworded filler, which is the same problem with more steps.
Consolidated With Redirects
Overlapping pages become one stronger page, and the old URLs redirect to it. No orphaned addresses, no wall of errors for the reviewer to find.
Removed Entirely
Closed locations, stub pages, and cities where you have no store will never carry value. They go, with proper status codes.
03 The Link Side: Bought, Blasted, And Inherited
Unnatural links to your site is the second dominant action here, and cannabis operators arrive at it by four routes. Some buy links outright. Some run guest posting at a volume that stops being editorial and becomes link building. Some blast directory submissions until the profile looks manufactured. And a great many inherit the problem from a previous agency whose work was never audited.
The last case is common and the most frustrating, because the current team is cleaning up something they did not do. It makes no difference to the outcome. The site owns the links regardless of who built them, and a request that leans on blaming a predecessor lands badly. Acknowledge it happened, take responsibility for not auditing it, and describe the cleanup.
On remediation, the order matters more than people expect.
Attempt Real Removals First
Contact the worst sources and ask for the links to come down. Google asks for a good faith effort to remove a link before disavowing it.
Log Every Attempt
Including the ones that never reply. Google asks a request to document the outcome of your efforts, and the outreach log is that record.
Disavow What Will Not Come Down
Google's disavow tool handles the remainder. A submission showing only a disavow file, with no outreach log, reads as taking the shortcut.
04 The Other Actions Worth Knowing About
Cloaking
The cannabis specific one, and usually accidental. A developer lets crawlers past the age gate on the user agent string alone, or serves them a simplified or cached page that no longer matches what a confirmed adult sees. If crawlers are let past the gate at all, they must receive the same page customers get. The simplest fix is a client side overlay on top of a fully rendered page, so the HTML never varies by who is asking.
Site Reputation Abuse
A third party publishing on your domain to borrow its standing, such as a rented subfolder, an outside coupon section or a syndication deal, now carries its own action under the site reputation policy. Google's recommended fixes are to noindex that content, move it to another domain, or remove it.
Spam, Hacks, And Structured Data
User generated spam and structured data issues round out the manual actions, and hacked content arrives separately in the Security Issues report with its own review request. They share one requirement: the fix has to stop the problem coming back. Removing spam without adding moderation means the problem can return before the review completes.
05 What Reviewers Actually Reward
A reviewer reads a lot of these. They are not looking for persuasion, and they are certainly not looking for length. Google asks a request to explain the issue, describe the steps taken to fix it and document the outcome. Everything else is noise.
That means admitting the problem plainly rather than framing it as a misunderstanding. It means stating what you did in numbers, because thirty four pages inventoried and twenty two rewritten is checkable in a way that we improved our content is not. It means linking documentation the reviewer can open. And it means not arguing, not making excuses, and not blaming a previous agency or a competitor.
This is also the part where outside help changes the economics. Remediation on a mid sized chain runs four to eight weeks, and recovery as a fixed scope project exists because that work has a clear end: the action is lifted or it is not.
06 Why Requests Get Denied
Five reasons come up again and again. Submitting before the fixes are live, so the reviewer sees the problem still there. Fixing only the examples Google named while leaving the rest of the pattern untouched. Rewriting so lightly that pages are still recognisably the same. Removing pages without proper redirects, creating a wall of errors. And writing a defensive request instead of an accountable one. What a denied request costs you is its own read, because the price is higher than most teams expect.
This builder blocks on the reasons it can detect, and it does so deliberately. A denial is not a neutral outcome you can simply try again after. Each one costs a review cycle of days or weeks, and the next request has to show what changed. Waiting a week to finish the work properly is usually cheaper than spending a review cycle proving you were not ready.
07 Where Recovery Fits In Dispensary SEO
Recovery comes before growth. New content and new pages built on top of an active manual action sit under the same suppression, so money spent on growth during an action buys less than it would once the action lifts.
That ordering is why cannabis SEO consultants treat a manual action as a stop-everything event rather than one project among many. It is also why this builder refuses to draft a request before the work is done.
If you are not sure whether your drop is a manual action, an algorithm update, or something technical, the free audit reads the site and tells you which recovery you are actually facing.
A Draft, Not A Submission
What this produces is a starting point built on your answers. Read it through, put it in your own words where it does not sound like you, and never include anything you cannot evidence. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you enter here is uploaded or stored.
The recovery we are asked about most often took four rejected appeals before we saw it. Nothing in the wording was the problem. The team had fixed the ten URLs Google listed and left the other two hundred and thirty pages matching the same pattern untouched, then argued the point four times.
Questions About Manual Actions And Reconsideration Requests
Manual action recovery runs four to eight weeks before anything is submitted. How that work is scoped →
Found Something And Not Sure How Serious It Is?
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