Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have cleaned up my site (i believe at least) after a penalty was applied to my site. I believe the penalty was applied because of duplicate content and over-optimisation. I know there is the +30 and +950 penalty but in my case all my search results have been push back to +100/page 10. Majority of my pages sits between pg 10 to pg 20. Once have cleaned up my site i have submitted reconsideration request but no joy.
In terms of cleaning up my site, i have removed duplicate links and content mostly those reported on my WMT and remove any over-optimisation on my pages. Validate most of my pages using W3C.
So my first question is when you submit a reconsideration request and nothing happens. Do you just wait and add unqiue content or it means there is still something that google has seen and you haven't fix yet.
My second question is how can you tell if a penalty is a manual one or automatic.
My third question is what one needs to do differently to get a manual penalty removed.
That first question is a tough call, because it depends on the work flow at Google. How many weeks have you waited?
There's also no certain way to know if a penalty is manual or automatic. When the penalty is only on some keywords, I think that's usually algorithmic. When it's across all the site's rankings, it can be either. Google does prefer to automate all the ranking decisions and some penalties that were manual do become algorithmic later on.
If there is a manually applied penalty, it's often because of off-page factors - something about backlinks was seen as manipulative. What the Webmaster Guidelines call sneaky redirects might also only get flagged after a manual inspection - same thing with some kinds of cloaking.
So the difference is often that the cause of the penalty is harder to clean up. An algorithmic penalty is often removed automatically. But a manual penalty (after the penalty flag is cleared) may still only be removed in slow steps.
If this is an over-optimization penalty, then you may need to wait until the next time Google calculates the threshold for "how much is too much." Many sites cam out of the penalty with no apparent causem except that a lot of time passed. They did all the clean-up, submitted a reconsideration request, and nothing happened. Then some months later, rankings returned.
1) Since you don't have any way to exactly tell if still is something wrong or just need to wait, triple check everything again (and that would be better before filing reinclusion request). However I'd wait up to 4 months to say you had no joy, penalized sites must "pay" some time in Google's no serp jail.
2) You can't
3) I can't think of anything different more than fixing site and ask reinclussion request (which I personally prefer to avoid because means you recongnize you spammed Google, so I'd do that only after waiting to heal automatically)
