Has anyone had their Google manual spam penalty lifted without notice?

[eugeneku]

In June of this year, our company submitted a reconsideration request, which Google rejected and confirmed that they had a manual spam penalty placed on us. After cleaning up our extensive link portfolio, we submitted our 2nd reconsideration at the end of this month (July) and received this response:

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Dear site owner or webmaster of domain,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider domain 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.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

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1. Has anyone else or their clients experienced this recently?

2. Can this be attributed to the "softer" Panda update?

3. Any other additional information is greatly appreciated.

[jesse-landry]

Yes this has happened to me but not recently.

Not sure about the rest... sorry I am unable to elaborate.

Google does not communicate well on these issues so it would not surprise me in the least. But I had a domain that was Penguined and is back without any notice... Who knows..

[Chris.Menke]

eugeneku, yes, manual penalties do expire. Per John Mu:

"If your site receives a notification of web-spam or manual action in Webmaster Tools, then that will be due to a web-spam review and manual action that has been taken. While manual actions will expire at some point, I would strongly not recommend sweeping them under the carpet and hoping that they go away on their own -- at least if you're interested in having your site be optimally represented in our search results."

[MarieHaynes]

I agree with Chris.  I thought I'd add some personal experience here.  I worked on an unnatural links penalty for a site with a horrendous backlink profile.  After several weeks of work we filed for reconsideration.  Previously every time the site owner applied for reconsideration he had failed.  This time we got the same message as you.

At first I felt sick that we had spent so much time (and he had spent so much money) trying to get rid of a penalty that had expired on its own.  But, I now know that if the webspam team revisits your site and sees that you have not done the work to clean it up then they will re-penalize you and that often the second penalty is worse than the first.

Also, the backlink cleanup was necessary for Penguin reasons.