Do I have a manual penalty?

[JillB2013]

My rankings and traffic suddenly went down about 50% around the end of Feb 2013.

I never received any warnings in webmaster tools (and as far as I know never did anything even vaguely black hat) but thought it might be a penalty since the drop was so steep and as far as I know there were no major algo updates at the time.

I sent a reconsideration request expecting to receive an answer that I have no manual penalty. Instead, I received the following email:

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.sitename.com/.

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

There have been no changes in my rankings.

Does this reply mean that I have/had a manual penalty?

[TomRayner]

Hi Jill

Every so often I hear from someone who gets this sort of ambiguous reply.  It's not that helpful, but here's what I can tell you from past experience.

If there was a manual penalty: the Google reviewer has not mentioned that it is still present.  To me this suggests that any manual penalty that you may have briefly had, if any at all, has now been lifted.

Usually, when you get a reconsideration request that explicitly confirms this, it says that you may need to wait a while until your status is restored.

Because this is also omitted, it leads me to suggest that you may have an algorithmic penalty on your site that is present.  We haven't seen a penguin algorithm refresh for a while, so it may suggest that your site may be suffering from duplicate content and/or Panda issues.

If you scroll to near the end of this article http://www.seowizz.net/2012/10/the-disavow-tool-works-real-sites-real-recoveries.html it features your specific reply and also draws the conclusion that there is no manual penalty, but there is an algorithmic one.

I think it may be a Panda issue, you can cross reference the time of your penalty with the Panguin tool for analytics, which is really helpful.  If one of the last Panda refreshes matches up with your dates, it at least gives you a starting point.

Hope this helps