Has your site been hit by recent algorithm updates? Are you thinking of submitting reconsideration request to lift your site’s penalties and regain lost search engine presence? We know that it is one of the ways to get your site Google penalty-free, but how long does it really take for Google to respond and resolve site penalty issues?
Google’s web spam team processes all the reconsideration requests sent by webmaster and site owners. You can send a reconsideration request though your Google Webmaster Tool account, but let me remind you that sending a request does not guarantee that your site penalties would be automatically lifted. According to Matt Cutts, it can be a week or several days to get an initial response to a reconsideration request.
In order to have a greater chance of getting your penalties removed, it is essential that you write a complete and in detailed letter, supported by facts and data that you did not really intended to violate Google rules and guidelines. Also, show some proofs that you are working hard to clean your site, you can do this by showing screenshots of link removal requests that you sent out to spam sites which could have triggered your site to being penalised.
The Process
After you have sent the request, you will receive a confirmation from Google informing you that they had received your reconsideration request; it normally arrives in your inbox within 1-2 days. If you were not able to receive anything within this period, there might have been problems with the submission process. I suggest that you consider a resubmission to make sure that they would get your request.
Below is an example of a message that you will received once Google successfully received your reconsideration request:
We’ve received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: https://www.yourdomain.com
We’ll review the site. If we find that it’s no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we’ll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can’t reply individually to each request.
It will take a few days or weeks before you hear a respond from Google with regards to the status of your request. The numerous amounts of requests they are receiving from other site owners also contributes to the delay since they are reviewing your website manually.
There are also 3 types of responses you might receive after sending your reconsideration request. See below:
1) Penalty Lifted – After thorough review on your website and the actions you have taken, Google finally lifted the penalty and your site is visible on their indexes again.
2) Penalty Not Lifted – You gave an effort to clean up your site but it is still not enough in the eyes of Google. There might still be some bad links to remove. You can then send another reconsideration request once you think that you have done your part of making your site sober.
3) Pending – This is when the process takes longer due to multiple issues on your website. Google is extensively scanning all these issues on your website thus acquiring more time before you get the results.
The sweetest part of all of these is when you accomplished your mission and you were able to convince Google to revoke your site’s penalty. A clear indication that you are back on track and the penalty has been lifted is when you receive a message like this on your Google Webmaster Tool account:
Dear site owner or webmaster of https://www.yourdomain.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider https://www.yourdomain.com/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. 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 your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.
Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
