Not all RRs get responses - and two months is a pretty long time, though I have heard of responses coming in that far out.

It seems to me that the more a site shows a history of "artificial manipulation" efforts in Google's eyes, the less likely a response is. And yet, even those sites can sometimes re-appear in the SERPs after a thorough clean up. Often that kind of recovery is on a time delay, however.

I waited several months and then submitted another. 3 days later I got a reply to both. I think some get lost in the system. I'd submit another.

Thank you, realmaverick. Your experience suggests that the "back to the end of queue" situation did not happen, a positive bit of info indeed. So, did the second RR differ from the first or have you sent just a copy?

Thanks!

The one time I had to deal with RR for a client who was completely banned, it took three tries (and I used the same wording every time) before I got an answer back. That was a few years ago, but between that experience and what I've heard from friends, I do believe that some requests get lost in the system.

Both were the same, both stating that no manual penalty was made.

Which at least rules that out. I wasn't sure at the time if it was Panda or above the fold, as both updates happened a day apart.

Sent a reconsideration request a few months ago, it took 8 weeks to hear back. They told me to look for unnatural links and to tell them about the ones that I have no control over. I created a document that contained over 200 links, and included a link to that doc in my 2nd request. Two weeks elapsed and I got the same canned reply. That document has never been viewed. It's hardly worth it to give in to their lip service. Your reconsideration request will likely be read by a lazy employee who gets an endorphin rush from your suffering or doesn't have time to read it in between their tweeting. I was able to have a significant number of links removed, but that didn't matter. Since the document wasn't viewed, they didn't do a fair analysis, but then again I didn't really expect any better from them.

That document has never been viewed.

That is really harsh! Are there any more members with reports like this?

How can you tell if a Google doc has been viewed or not?

By looking at your logs..( he didn't say a Google document )..Thus, I presume he means a document on his site..
If it was a "Google document"..this search string will tell you all you need to know about "how", and then some..
"how to tell if a Google document has been viewed"

HTH :)

By looking at your logs..( he didn't say a Google document )..Thus, I presume he means a document on his site..

That's right, it was a file on my server. No views according to my logs. It was a complete waste of my time, and a complete lie on Google's part (that they review all requests and want to see a "show of good faith").

That is really harsh! Are there any more members with reports like this?

Ted, I know I have seen a report similar to mine recently, but I don't recall whether it was on this board, or elsewhere. I believe that person had used Google Docs in their case.

@tedster:

That is really harsh! Are there any more members with reports like this?

Yup! My experience is exactly what crobb305 said!

I also waited 8 weeks all the while checking if anyone has accessed the file with detailed list of my efforts, which I continued to update as more links were removed. Noone ever came. The file is on my server, so I have all the logs and can positively say it was not accessed.

I have also by now removed 80%+ of those bad links, and thought it would have shown "significant effort" on my part but Google does not seem to be interested.

My experience differs from crobb305's in that I never got any reply whatsoever. I have since sent a second RR, along the same lines, and referred to the file again. Still nothing, total wait is 10 weeks and counting.

Yup! My experience is exactly what crobb305 said!

I also waited 8 weeks all the while checking if anyone has accessed the file with detailed list of my efforts, which I continued to update as more links were removed. Noone ever came. The file is on my server, so I have all the logs and can positively say it was not accessed.

I have also by now removed 80%+ of those bad links, and thought it would have shown "significant effort" on my part but Google does not seem to be interested.

My experience differs from crobb305's in that I never got any reply whatsoever. I have since sent a second RR, along the same lines, and referred to the file again. Still nothing, total wait is 10 weeks and counting.

And part of the problem is that the body text of the reconsideration request is very limited. We have been told to include external documentation, so that's what we do. Apparently we were deceived, or those employees assigned to review the reconsideration requests are simply not doing their job.

@crobb305: it won't make much of a difference in terms of handling the RR but if you are trying to cram more info into it, type it outside the textarea on the Google's page, in an external text editor. It's being limited by JS and it gets confused when you copy from your external text editor and paste into the textarea. The text seems to stay in there despite being longer than JS would have allowed.

I routinely go over the JS-imposed length limit on that form (yeah, more RRs sent in the last 12 months than I would admit to) and only this last RR seems to have issues, so I hope it's not Google getting angry at me for sending them longer RRs than they like. Or is it? :(

Anyhow, I have no way of knowing if the extra text isn't just cut off during the submission or db storing but at least the form generates no errors. Perhaps worth a try?

I last emailed them at the end of May2012, I have not had a response back and have also sent reminders. I was given a specific reference by google to include in the subject box, but still nothing. I had included a list of all actions I was able and also unable to achieve. My act of good faith - spending weeks and weeks, and in fact still seeing what else I can do - but nothing.

I do fully understand the enormity of the situation at Google and that to penalise so many websites in one go with the initial emailing via WMT will have put immense pressure on the team there, but when we have done our bit and (I'll say it again), tried to deal with the negative SEO attached to us aswell (we are also in the financial field) and featured in UK Best buys with Which etc it is galling that a business can be so affected but where we are so not in control as there needs to be a two way dialogue to resolve these issues.

I have no idea whether Google has now seen eveything we have done or not - it is the unknown that is so perlexing.

I am happy to list my Google reference if this will help!

@agent10:

I have no idea whether Google has now seen eveything we have done or not - it is the unknown that is so perplexing.

Unfortunately, I'm inclined to believe that noone [human] had seen what we've written in those RRs. I also think that this is a sort of a chicken-and-egg type of a paradox: due to the increased load on the spam team, they are [my conjecture beyond this point] only responding when they see significant changes to the site through their backend.

For the changes to register, especially changes to the link profile, all the sites linking to you need to be re-crawled and re-indexed. But, since they are by definition bad sites (hence the penalty for links from them), their crawl budget is very-very small. It may take ages for Google to realize that the bad links are gone. I am seeing this in my "Links to your site" in WMT. It still shows links that were removed (site-wide) almost 3 months ago. Since my bad links are easy to spot (they are a part of the site template), I can tell that Google already knows that some links are gone because the site's snapshot picture has changed. But it may take them years to re-crawl all 10,000+ pages of some of the autoblogs that my links ended up on.

Even more depressing is that it still shows link from sites that no longer exist (mostly domains expired), some are gone for 3+ months. Perhaps they are not willing to forgive those bad links because they think the links can be turned back on if someone restores the site? Or maybe it's because they cannot re-crawl a dead site and therefore the ghosts of the links from it are going to haunt me forever?

Anyhow, bottom line is that I think before a human gets a glimpse of the RR, their backend needs to show some significant change in the site's parameters. Perhaps this has not been the case before Penguin but these days they probably don't have manpower to handle the mountain of new RRs that Penguin brought about.

In my particular case I think I will be moving the site without waiting for the results of the RRs. 301-ing every single URL on the site should stir things up enough to catch a human's interest in my RR, or so I hope.

So, I have gotten it responded to, finally. Rejected (some or all of your pages still violate...) And guess what: still noone read that file where I explained what I did!

Yea I'd actually be amazed if they *did* open an external file like that. I'd include it in the form.

The painful thing is that the external file is Google's own suggestion for handling lots of data in a Reconsideration Request. It they aren't making sure their employees follow through, then they have even bigger problems than we think!

I submitted a Reconsideration Request on 16th August and received a response less than a week later, on 22nd.

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.example.com/ 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.

Sadly it appears that the Google Webmaster Forums have very little input from Google employees these days.

Shame.

[edited by: tedster at 3:05 pm (utc) on Sep 10, 2012]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]

Sadly it appears that the Google Webmaster Forums have very little input from Google employees these days.

One only has to have a quick look there, to understand why G reps rarely visit tehm, the vast majority of the posts are near incomprehensible, posted by people who have no idea what they are doing, but they put adsense on it anyway, and are usually ( 99% of the time ), if one looks at their websites, in very clear breach of TOS.. or so ad laden, as to make the half time at the Superbowl look like a PSA..

Agreed.

Some form of moderation is necessary, but it really isn't helpful for Google to tell webmasters to 'see our Webmaster Help Forum for support'.

At this point I think it's fair to say Google has all but abandoned those with legitimate concerns.

If Google tells you explicitly that site x has no penalty, then as far as I can see there's no further advice available.

the vast majority of the posts are near incomprehensible, posted by people who have no idea what they are doing

@Leosghost: you must've never manned a helpdesk of any kind. You stick your neck out and start accepting requests for any type of help, you'll be amazed at the questions people ask sometimes. It just comes with the territory and is easily explained: people that do know exactly what to write in those requests, don't write any requests. Being able to formulate your question properly gets you more that 50% of the way to solving your issue.

So, I see it this way: Google wants to earn a cool $Bil providing services directly based on the work of webmasters around the world, Google needs to provide some help to those webmasters. That automatically means that you have to be ready for the flood of various kinds of questions, ranging from completely insane to simply people explaining how they've already solved their problem.

I agree with JackR that any help in case there's no manual penalty would be giving an unfair advantage to some sites at the expense of others but if they slapped you with a manual action, they have to at least identify what for. The only time when I was able to escape a manual action (other than its expiration in some 2 years) was when they actually told me what they whacked me for, and I was able to explain that they were not right, and they reversed the action. So, errors on their part do happen, and that's why some recourse is needed.

But as far as the current situation, I think what happens is: they've completely drowned in the flood of post-Penguin requests. It is entirely my conjecture but I think they have some kind of a filter in place that only alerts a human when there was a very significant change in the site's HTML code. It is not very helpful, however, if you are dealing with off-site factors, such as bad links. Your site itself does not change and the overworked Google spam team thinks that you keep sending RRs without changing anything - so they automatically reject you.

Given the number of RRs they process, they have to have some sort of automation in place, and it just seems easier, quicker and cheaper to implement a software that takes a snapshot of a sample page of your site to look for any HTML change than to re-crawl all 1000s of sites that link to you. I think the only way to make them actually look at your site is to make significant layout and structure changes, regardless of what you think the penalty is for. I'm going to test the theory soon.

@Leosghost: you must've never manned a helpdesk of any kind

Too right;)...Life is already too short ;))