A Reconsideration Request is a request for another manual review of a website that has been punished by a manual penalty. If a domain is affected by an algorithmic penalty, sending a Reconsideration Request will have no effect.
Depending on the scale and severity of the violation against the Google Quality Guidelines there is a certain timeframe in which the manual penalty subjects a website to punishment. This could be 30 days for a slight violation or a much longer time for a more severe violation. Once this time is up, the manual penalty is removed automatically.
In order to lift a manual penalty beforehand, you can send a Reconsideration Request to Google. Before sending this request, however, make sure you have done everything to ensure the violation will never happen again. Setting up a documentation of all the steps you took to ensure that another violation will not happen can be very helpful for Google to quickly handle the request.
After sending in the Reconsideration Request you will get a confirmation that the request for the manual review of your website has been received by Google. It may take a few days or even a few weeks before you get an answer from Google with the result as well as an assessment of your case.
The assessment usually looks like this:
- “Your Reconsideration Request has been granted”: The request for a manual review has been accepted and the penalty has been lifted
- “Your Reconsideration Request has been declined”: The request for a manual review has not been accepted and the penalty has not been lifted
- “Your Reconsideration Request has been processed”: The request for a manual review has been accepted, but the penalty has not been lifted at this point in time as only a fraction of the problems have been corrected
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