<\/span>Google forms<\/span><\/h3>\nFor sites that had previously been flagged as spam by Google, there used to be a reconsideration request<\/a> where webmasters could request a second view of their site.\u00a0<\/p>\nThis was useful in the case of a manual action, meaning a person had spotted an issue and manually marked it as spam.<\/p>\n
But, Penguin was an algorithm change. Google announced that reconsideration requests wouldn’t work if a site has suffered since the Penguin update.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Instead, webmasters had to reduce the spam on their sites. Once done, they’d eventually recover from Penguin and appear in SERPs again.<\/p>\n
That said, there seemed to be some acknowledgment that sites were impacted by Penguin unfairly.<\/p>\n
Google released a form where webmasters could flag this issue to Google<\/a>. This same form could also be used to report sites that should’ve been penalized.<\/p>\n