How To Tell If Disavow Request Processed

[austtr]

Regarding sites that were hit by Penguin (dates match) but have not received a manual penalty message.

In one of MC's videos, he said that a disavow request can be submitted for sites affected this way IF the likely problem is bad links.

As far as I know Google does not acknowledge if/when they process a disavow request. Is there any way to find out if anything has happened?

[dethfire]

There is no way. You can only guess if your rankings return.

[salvatorecapolupo]

you usually need to wait at least some weeks, and you can't know any detail about your request. just measure your rankings again until you note some change :)

[Shai]

Submitting a disavow file is dissimilar to sending a reconsideration request. It is an automated filter acting between your site and the inbound links. A little like sun tan lotion. It filters out (NOFOLLOWs) the links as they come in.

It inherently works in a progressive manner as the toxic effect of the links are only removed when the spiders re-crawl the pages with the links on them, eventually follows the links and then, if the links are on the disavow file, they get filtered out at that point.

So, in answer to your question, the file can start working almost immediately or it could take a very long time depending on the scale of the file.

However, typically, people start seeing some movement in rankings (assuming it is done correctly) within 2 or 3 weeks when a significant section of the spammy pages starts to get re-crawled.