"We've processed your reconsideration request for www...." - Could this be good news?

[ChrisHolgate]

Hey,

We recently had a Google Penguin related links warning and I've been going through Google WMT and removing the most offensive links.  We have requested resubmission a couple of times and have had the standard response of:

"
Site violates Google's quality guidelines

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider your site for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
"

On the 5th September after spending another couple more days removing the most prolific offenders we resubmitted the site again and again got the automated response saying they had received our request.  A week later on the 13th September we got a slightly different response of :

"
We've processed your reconsideration request

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index your site.

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.

"

I left it another couple of weeks to see if we'd get a slightly more in depth response however so far there has been nothing.  I'll be honest in not being entirely sure what this means.

The e-mails says simultaneously 'We've now reviewed your site' (as in past tense) but then continues with "If we don't find any problems" which suggests a future tense.  I’m unsure from reading the e-mail whether they have indeed reviewed it (and just not told us the outcome) or whether it’s just a delayed e-mail saying that they have received the reconsideration request.

Of course, if I received this e-mail off anyone other than Google I would have thought I was still in the dog house but the fact that it differs from the standard ‘Site violates Google’s quality guidelines’ message leads me to believe that something has changed and they may be happy with the site or at least happier than they were previously.

Has anybody else received the latter message and has anybody managed to determine exactly what it means?

Cheers guys!

[crucialx]

I've wondered the same thing, we received the same response as you. And the ranking for the keyword we had been penalized went from page 15 to page 4. However around the same time we increased in rankings we had made some on page changes which optimised the page a bit better for that keyword.

It's hard to tell what exactly has happened!

[ChrisHolgate]

Just to provide an update, we've continued to make cleanups and have done another couple of reconsideration requests and received the same response every time.  I guess work must continue