Are Manual Penalties Still Timed-Out?

[totalodds]

Are Manual Penalties Still Timed-Out?

A while ago Matt Cutts stated that manual action penalties (issued by a human reviewer, no algorithmic) are essentially "timed-out"
[youtube.com...]


So If you have received an unnatural links penalty in your WMT -

"We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. "

1. Are these still timed-out and if so how long do you think these penalties last?

2. How can you get a direct response from Google search quality team rather than a template response to your reconsideration request?

[klark0]

1. Yep they time out. But I've seen first hand, that a domain can be re-issued a second manual penalty ...six months after the first one was issued. No new links or content was added to the site, no attempt was made to clean it up.

2. There's no one way for it to happen. People who've submitted multiple requests, seem to have better luck in getting more direct email responses though. It probably also helps to have what would otherwise be a good site if it weren't for bad links.