Reconsideration Request a Success!

[William.Lau]

Hi all,

Well I've finally gotten been able to get the penalty removed judging by this email:

"Dear site owner or webmaster of xxx,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider xxx 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"

This was after a reconsideration request was sent prior to disavow tool being released. In addition I also applied a disavow of all the links I was unsuccessful in removingwithout contacting Google and letting the original reconsideration request run it's course.

I am making this post just to let everyone know that the hard work pays off and Google is just trying to make sure you are doing your best in removing the links. As 'Ryan Kent' always emphasizes, you must really be diligent and honest when trying to remove links. You also need to keep documentation, I anchored contact pages and email addresses, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th attempt dates.

Now with the disavow tool, I believe if you do a "good faith" in removing the links, and it is well documented, you can use the disavow tool after multiple attempts, correlating both the disavow links and the spreadsheet sent to Google is and should be very important in a reconsideration request.

Good luck!

Also I received the message from WMT, and wondering does anyone know how long is 'some time' before site is reindexed? So far our organic traffic is still about the same prior. So I would like to hear what other's experience are after a successful reconsideration.

Feel free to ask any questions!

[GeorgeAndrews]

Great news William! Good job. I imagine the wait time is going to be at least whatever your normal crawl rate is.

Thanks for sharing your story.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

That's great to hear - and with it having been manual action that was taken, it's nice to know these are actually handled by real people - as Matt Cutts states here.

Andy

[William.Lau]

Yep, One of the things that have surprised me was previous reconsideration requests that allowed me to communicate directly through email.

It was surprising to actually talk to someone from Google via email about a free service. The emails were pretty personal and one time even gave a link example.

[EGOL]

Nice work!   Hope you get back to the top quickly.

[malecce]

Interesting but How long have you waited to be reconsidered?

[William.Lau]

I sent a request on Oct 14th and got a response on Oct 18th. I've been removing links around Aug.

Responses whether denial or success seemed to range 1-2 weeks.