As we described a month or so ago, Google has both automated and manual penalties and based on which one you have, either submitted a reconsideration request will help or it won’t.

For the first time ever, at least that I’ve seen, Google has replied to a reconsideration request telling the webmaster that his site was not penalized with a manual penalty. Since there was no manual penalty, there is nothing Google can manually do to help the site rank any better.

In the past, Google did not reply to people who submitted reconsideration requests and did not have a penalty. Instead they just let the email sit idle, delete it or ignore it completely. Now they are replying to some, telling them they have no manual penalty.

Here is a copy of the email as posted in WebmasterWorld:

This is good news. Now if you get one of these responses and you know you are penalized, you can make changes, wait for Google to recrawl your site and then hope whatever you fixed made a difference. Because automated penalties will fix themselves automatically when you make the necessary changes and Google picks up on those changes in their crawl.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.