Reconsideration request: Search Engine Land’s ultimate guide to Google penalties and messages

If you’ve received a manual penalty and have made a good faith effort to fix the issues that triggered it, you can request for Google to review your site so that you can have the penalty lifted. This is what is known as a reconsideration request.

After you submit your site for reconsideration, Google will confirm receiving a reconsideration request in the same way they acknowledge receiving a disavow file. The specific text seems to vary, often to manage expectations regarding the expected processing time.

Currently, there’s no officially guaranteed turnaround time for reconsideration requests to be processed. Experience shows that this process can take anywhere from a few hours (rare) to a few days (more common) to several weeks (worst-case scenario).

Google does acknowledge receiving a reconsideration request and includes the rationale provided underneath their message. In this case, because of the haphazard rationale, prospects for succeeding are bleak.

About the author

Kaspar Szymanski

Kaspar Szymanski is a founding member of SearchBrothers.com and a well-known Google Search expert specializing in recovering websites from Google penalties and helping websites improve their rankings with SEO Consulting. Before founding SearchBrothers.com, Kaspar was part of the Google Search Quality team, where he was the driving force behind global web spam tackling initiatives and the public face spearheading Google webmaster outreach and communication efforts.