How long does a reconsideration request take to process?

Matt's answer:

We have a question from Manchester in the UK. Laura wants to know, “I’ve been waiting for two months to hear back regarding a reconsideration request. Is this normal? There’s no one I can contact about it.” OK, that’s not normal. You could show up in the webmaster forum and ask what’s going on, but let me give you a little bit about the reconsideration request process, and sort of talk you through it. And basically tell you, no, that’s not normal. What I would do is I would actually do another reconsideration request, and I would mention, hey, I didn’t hear back, what’s going on here? But let me walk you through the process and what to expect. When you do a reconsideration request, you should get a sort of confirmation message pretty quickly that lets you know we got the reconsideration request. If you don’t see that, then maybe something went wrong in the submission, the form didn’t go through, or something along those lines. Much faster than two months, the backlog can vary. So it can be a week, or it can be several days if we have a lot of people all doing reconsideration requests. Maybe after we just started sending out a new type of message, for example. But you should hear back with one of roughly three different replies. The replies are basically yes, we think you’re in good shape, so your reconsideration request has been granted. It might be no, we still think you have some work to do, and so that’s the sort of thing where it’s like, OK, you need to keep improving the site. It can also in some situations be you don’t have any sort of manual issue at all, and you should hear back very quickly about that. Sometimes you flip the coin and you don’t land on heads, yes, or tails, no, you sort of get the very side of the coin. And in that case, you’ll get something that says we have processed your reconsideration request. Typically what that means is there might have been multiple issues. So maybe one issue is resolved, but there’s still another issue. Or we moved from something where we thought the entire domain was not as good to maybe we’re more granular. And so that just means, OK, there’s still some issues, but more of them have been resolved. But typically you’ll hear back very quickly. And it will be the sort of thing where you don’t have any sort of manual web spam action at all. Yes, you did, and now we’ve revoked that manual web spam action, and so you’re in good shape now. No, we still think your site has issues. Or we’ve processed. And that just means there’s something more complex going on. Often multiple things going on, and maybe one is resolved, but not all of them is resolved. So I hope that helps. Typically, two months is way too long to hear back. If it’s been more than a couple weeks, then I would start to ask about it on the webmaster forum It can, in some circumstances, get the backlog to be that long, but that’s typically when something really big is launched, or some new message has gone out. So I hope that helps in terms of giving some guidance on what to expect from reconsideration requests.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: