Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request. Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines....
If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well....
...However, we have to maintain a delicate balance: trying to give as much information to webmasters as we can without letting spammers probe how to do more harm to users....
A couple of years ago, in addition to confirming that we had received the request, we started sending a second message to webmasters confirming that we had processed their request. This was a huge step for webmasters who were anxiously awaiting results. Since then, we’ve received feedback that webmasters wanted to know the outcome of their requests. [my bold]
[edited by: tedster at 6:55 pm (utc) on Sep 15, 2011]
"I must be missing something, here. Why this blog post now?"Simple, really. Google is on damage control mode, their ship is taking water and as long as it doesn't affect their bottom line they'll do what it can to stop the bad press. Complain about a set of SERPs on certain techie sites and it will be fixed by afternoon, the damage control team at Google is listening. If you are a nobody in social media, screw you.
We're happy that Google has set the standard on tools, transparency, and communication with site owners, but we'll keep looking for ways to do even better.Even Philip Morris and other tobacco companies beat you on transparency. Nice try.
I'll say this - for all the frustrations involved in both WebmasterTools and the Reconsideration Request process, I'm happy that Google invested resources in this area. It's miles beyond anything any search engine ever did before to communicate with webmasters
