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:

Answer:

So what do you think? Honesty?

Forum discussion at Google+.