If you've seen a different response, please send it to us in a comment.
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Reconsideration request for http://www.xxxxxxx.xxx/: No manual spam actions found
April 22, 2011
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.xxxxxxx.xxx/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.xxxxxxx.xxx/ 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
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
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This response suggests that this specific rank loss is the result of an algorithmic action, or automated Google penalty, that can be unwound by simply fixing the issue.
We know from previous posts by Matt Cutts & this video that manual penalties come with a clock - a time frame that determines the length of time you'll be punished. From the penalties experienced by our clients, we suspect those time frames somehow line up with the perceived severity of your non-compliance. We've seen the time frame on newly compliant sites range from 90 days to over 6 months.
This is controversial by itself - so you get put in jail for some period of time, even if your rank loss was triggered by an inadvertent error and you've corrected it. We'll be looking at this much more closely now to determine whether that time frame is started from the fix, or from the start of the penalty, and exactly what the time frames may be. We strongly suspect they start once the site is compliant, and a reconsideration request is filed. We doubt a manual action is going to self correct once the site is compliant.
For automated penalties, we suspect you're not getting out until you're compliant, and then have to wait out some additional period before release as the bots update the index.
Here's another response that also gives new information:
request for http://www.xxxxxxxx.xxx/: Site violates Google's quality guidelines May 5, 2011
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.xxxxxxxx.xxx/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.xxxxxxxx.xxx/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines.
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.xxxxxxxx.xxx/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.
If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team
Penalized sites should ask for reconsideration as a first step to gain info as to why. Very helpful info - thanks Bob!
Not all responses give you information - here's one that just came in. Looks like the same old non-informative boiler plate:
We've processed your reconsideration request for http://www.xxxxxx.xxx/ May 7, 2011
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.xxxxxx.xxx/.
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.
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