Google Reconsideration Request - for rapid link building

How long does it take? Do they respond?

[Swirleigh]

We recently got a whole bunch of <related sites> to point links to our site's state pages... gaining 4700 links last month. . . but it got our listings removed from the SERPs before the month even ended.

I've just submitted a Reconsideration Request, listing the pages that got the links and identifing the unnatural links. I am not sure how long it would take to get all the links to change to no-follow... which I told Google in the request.

Will just admitting the mistake and identifing the unnatural links for them to devalue remove the penalty?

Or will we need to get all those sites to change the link to no-follow first?

Does Google respond? Or just remove the penalty? Or just ignore you if they decide not to remove it?

How much time could the penalty and all this last?

[edited by: tedster at 11:47 pm (utc) on Sep. 6, 2007]
[edit reason] remove specifics [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello Swirleigh, and welcome to the forums. Here's a related discussion you may find informative:

does google eventually forgive for aggressive link building? [webmasterworld.com]

Google rarely responds to a reconsideration request - they either remove the penalty or not. Conventional wisdom is that, once penalized, you need to be "squeaky clean" for a reconsideration request to actually remove the penalty.