Two of my favorite Google Search Quality folks, Kaspar Szymanski and Uli Lutz, put together an article on the Google Webmaster Central blog named Backlinks and reconsideration requests.
The article is basically an FAQ on when to use the reconsideration request specific around bad and low quality links.
Here are the questions but to get the answers, go to the story:
When should I file a reconsideration request?
Should I file a reconsideration request if I think my site is affected by an algorithmic change?
How can I assess the quality of a site’s backlinks?
How do I clean a bad backlink profile?
How much information do I need to provide?
How long does it take to process reconsideration requests?
What are the possible outcomes of a reconsideration request?
Where can I get more guidance?
Kaspar added on Google+ that they are “working on translating this post to Chinese, Japanese, French, Polish, Portuguese, German and Italian.”
Forum discussion at Google+.
