There was recently a lot of controversy around why Thumbtack saw their manual action reversed in less than a week.
Some suspect it is because it is a Google Capital backed company by Google denies that.
Google's John Mueller pretty much addressed this question head on in a hangout yesterday on Google+. He addressed the question at the 24:10 minute mark in the video.
It is a long answer, so in short, he said that basically often the manual actions team has no clue who invested in the site, so they don't take Google venture backed investments into consideration. He also added that in some cases, implying with Thumbtack, that it was an awesome reconsideration request, where they even possibly went through the trouble of writing a program to automatically clean up their unnatural links, and then submitted a detailed and comprehensive reconsideration request. Those types of reconsideration requests and clean ups result in a faster turn around on manual actions, John said.
Here is the video:
Here is the transcript, took me a while to do. :(
Question:
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.
Answer:
We don’t, don’t really, take into account what kind of sites they are, who they are owned by. A lot of these cases, it is not the case that even the web spam team kinda has this kind of background information on what kind of site it is, how big it is, who owns the site, who has invested in the site. I mean, that is something that was also suggested.So that is not something we take into account for the manual action processing and sometimes there are situations where the web spam team looks at it as says well, this is a fantastic job, they really did a complete cleanup of the issue here, maybe they even wrong some snazzy tools to kind of fix the issues on a broader scale and those are the situations where the web spam team would ays well this is a fantastic clean up, we need to revoke the manual action because it is not relevant.
And some of these sites when I look into them because people complain about them, so I try to double check what is actually happening there, they really do a fantastic job cleaning these things up.
So that is not always the case that I’d say, well this is a well known site and therefore gets proceeded faster. But it is really a case of what you submit in the reconsideration request. And a lot of the reconsideration requests when I look at them are really low quality, they are almost like, I totally fixed my issue but they don’t give us any information about what they actually did. And those are the type of reconsideration requests that tend to go back and forth a couple of times. So where the web spam team says, lets look at it in a week or two to see what actually changed, because we don’t have any information on what changed.
So that is the kind of thing where it just takes a lot longer to be processed. But if you can send us a reconsideration request that is really to the point, where you tell us exactly what you’ve been doing, you give us information showing that you’ve completely cleaned up this issue, then that is something that really helps us process these things faster. We don’t have to pass it along to other teams and discuss , we don’t have to wait to see how things are processed in regards to web search. We can really look at that and say this is clean, really well done and we can take that into account and take it as a sign we have to remove the manual action.
So that is something where if you have great people submitting the reconsideration request, who really do a fantastic job of cleaning these things up, sometimes you can get these processes a little bit faster. And of course, sometimes we do have a backlog that kind of applies across the board for all web sites where maybe the manual actions team has a lot to do on their plate at the moment and kind of have to process them a bit slower.
If you are seeing things that are really taking a lot longer than maybe a week or two, and that’s something you can also bring up to use. We can double check with the team to see what’s happening here. Is it getting stuck unnaturally because maybe it fell between the cracks or something like that or is there something we could do too help speed things up.
So what do you think? Honesty?
Forum discussion at Google+.
