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Google Sending Additional Reconsideration Request Responses To Webmasters

Monday I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google’s Webmaster Central team has begun stepping up webmaster communication, once again, this time by responding to reconsideration requests more actively then in the past. Google is now telling webmasters that submit reconsideration requests if their penalty is not a manual Google penalty, then there is […]

Barry Schwartz on April 13, 2011 at 9:22 am | Reading time: 3 minutes

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Monday I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google’s Webmaster Central team has begun stepping up webmaster communication, once again, this time by responding to reconsideration requests more actively then in the past.

Google is now telling webmasters that submit reconsideration requests if their penalty is not a manual Google penalty, then there is no reason to submit the reconsideration request. That doesn’t mean the site is suffering from an automated penalty, but it does mean that submitting a reconsideration request will play no role in helping the site rank better.

Pierre Far from Google confirmed this change in the comments saying:

Yes we’re running an experiment to give more feedback to webmasters with additional reconsideration response messages. This message and others are for some cases where we will be able to provide details about the outcome of the request, such as whether a manual spam action was revoked, if a site still violates our guidelines, or if Google wasn’t taking manual action against the site.

As you know, Google has both manual and automated penalties and removing an automated penalty requires you to make changes to your site and wait for Google to crawl, index and process the changes.

A manual penalty often does require a manual review or a waiting period.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a copy of one of these new notifications:

Dear site owner or webmaster of ,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider 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