Do Your Reconsideration Request Right & Get Results Faster

A hot topic in the SEO community has been the incredibly fast reconsideration request for (Google venture backed company) Thumbtack. Thumbtack's manual action was reversed in under a week, which is a virtually unheard of timeline.

In a Google Hangout (at the 24 minute 10 second mark), John Mueller stated that Thumbtack didn't get special treatment and advised audience members on reconsideration request best practices. The question was:

Does Google take in consideration the size of a company/site when processing responses for Manual Actions? Both RapGenius and Thumbtack penalties were processed/recovered very fast (with days not weeks). However, smaller sites sit for weeks/months.

John Mueller's response:

"We don't really take into account what kind of sites they are, who they're owned by... that's not something that we take into account for the manual action processing. And sometimes there are situations where, when the Webspam team looks at it they are like,

"Well, this is a fantastic job. They really did a complete cleanup of the issues here, maybe they even wrote some magic tools to kind of fix these issues on a broader scale." And those are the situations where they Webspam team will say, "Fantastic cleanup job, we need to revoke the manual action because it's not relevant."

...it's really the case of what you submit in the reconsideration request and a lot of the reconsideration requests, when I look at them, they're really low quality. They're almost like, "Hey Google, I fixed my issue!" But they don't give us any information about what they actually did. And those are the kind of reconsideration requests that tend to go back and forth a couple of times, that's where the Webspam team says,

"Well, let's look at it in a week or so to see what actually changed because we don't have any information about what actually happened here."

So that's the kind of thing where it just takes a lot longer to be processed.

If you find yourself on the wrong end of a Manual Penalty then be sure to refer to our reconsideration request resources: