tedster - 4:50 am on Aug 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

The area of Reconsideration Requests has become increasingly muddy, especially because Google now assesses some spam penalties by algorithm, and only manual penalties will be lifted through a Reconsideration Request. Unfortunately, there's no certain knowledge about what kind of spam penalty may have hit a website... so what's a webmaster to do?

Enter Google's Tiffany Oberoi who gave Eric Enge a very helpful interview last week. Nothing here is 100% new, but it is more clearly expressed than the piecemeal hodgepodge we'e had to go on to date. For example:

...we don't really think of spam algorithms as "penalties" — Google's rankings are the result of many algorithms working together to deliver the most relevant results for a particular query and spam algorithms are just a part of that system. In general, when we talk about "penalties" or, more precisely, "manual spam actions", we are referring to cases where our manual spam team stepped in and took action on a site... It can take us days to weeks to process [reconsideration] requests, and then more time for changes to go into effect, especially if we need to recrawl and reprocess your site. We do send a confirmation after we receive your request, so as long as you got that message then your request is in the queue to be reviewed. [stonetemple.com...]