I recently had a problem with my Google search engine results and assumed I was under a penalty. Time to totally panic.

So I did what you’re supposed to do, and fix whatever you think is wrong and then submit a request for reconsideration.

I watched a video on this topic. The people from Google said they promise they actually read all of the requests, but it might take a few weeks. The most important thing, was to confess all of your SEO sins and fix them. But what if you are not really sure you have sinned? Fix something and tell them. That’s what I did.

So you want to know how long it took to get a response? Three (3) days.

Here’s what I got back:

“Dear site owner or webmaster of http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site’s ranking in Google. There’s no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site’s ranking. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you’ve experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site’s content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you’ve changed the URLs for a large portion of your site’s pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. If you’re still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team”

Ironically, what was really wrong, was that my website had been marked as “parked” due to a bug. This bug had already been resolved by the time I got this reply. So I must have gotten a canned response, because they didn’t mention the bug at all in their reply.

But hey, at least I would have known I wasn’t under a penalty in 3 days. That’s pretty fast turnaround, don’t you think? Maybe if you are actually under a penalty it takes longer, I don’t know. If you’ve been penalized, how long did your response take?

If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill