Google has begun using revised language for some of their reconsideration requests and the question is, are these more confusing for users. I spotted two different cases posted to social media, one by @marie_haynes and the other by @BobMeinke last night.
Marie received a reconsideration request approval email, instead of it saying "Manual spam action revoked" it said "Reconsideration request approved for..." So that is pretty straight forward. Here is a picture:
But the one Bob Meinke received is a bit more confusing. It is one that says they still have link problems. It said because of the bad links, "therefore, when determining your site’s ranking, we will continue to demote links to your site as a factor in our calculations." It doesn't say Google will demote all the links, but just some of them. Is the whole site being penalized? Is part of the site being penalized. Are some links being discredited only? We know Google will sometimes penalize parts or all of the site, sometimes downgrade the site or just ignore the bad links. This obviously isn't giving away all the details but it is interesting to see the language here.
Here is a screen shot of this message:
Here is the text copied and pasted:
In response to your reconsideration request, Google has reviewed your site for violations of Google Webmaster Guidelines. Based on this review, Google still believes that there is a pattern of links to your site that attempts to boost its ranking in search results. Therefore, when determining your site’s ranking, we will continue to demote links to your site as a factor in our calculations. Once you have removed a majority of these unnatural links, file another reconsideration request. After we evaluate your site again and determine that you have complied with our guidelines, we will remove this manual action.
Have you seen more examples of these?
Forum discussion at @marie_haynes and @BobMeinke on Twitter.
