A question that comes up often in the SEO world is how long does it take after one submits a reconsideration request in Google Search Console to get a response. It can vary and earlier this year we seemed to have some backlogs there but John Mueller of Google said on Twitter "there is no defined time for a reconsideration request to be processed."
John then said that "sometimes it's a week or so, sometimes it's a few months." Why would one take longer than the next? He said there is no reason. He said "It's not dependent on whether you bought the domain recently (and we see a lot of abuse attempts with expired domains, so it doesn't mean it's easier)."
In 2012 Google told us there are four categories of reconsideration requests.
(1) You do not have a manual action against your web site.
(2) You did have a manual action but Google removed it after reviewing your reconsideration request.
(3) You do have a manual action against your site and still do because there are still issues with your site.
(4) Google processed your reconsideration request, which means, you are between numbers two and three. Google needs to look deeper and maybe you resolved some things but not all things. Maybe Google found something interesting they want to look deeper into.
I am not sure if this is still valid but here is that video:
Things may have changed over the last several years.
There's no defined time for a reconsideration request to be processed; sometimes it's a week or so, sometimes it's a few months. It's not dependent on whether you bought the domain recently (and we see a lot of abuse attempts with expired domains, so it doesn't mean it's easier).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 11, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Marie who does a lot of these says it can take up to several months:
Our experience lately is that it can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to SEVERAL MONTHS to hear a reply from Google on reconsideration requests. https://t.co/9kIE1XJYT3
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 13, 2020
