I won my Google reconsideration request

So today i woke up and took a look at all of my rankings for each of the websites i own and to my utter surprise, one of my affiliate websites has regained all of its rankings prior to be slapped by Google.

On the 13th of October i wrote a reconsideration request to Google for my website which i've spoke of before on the forum when trying to get to the bottom of the cause. Upon seeing visitors to my website which was previous in the depth of 700+ in Google for the past two months, i logged in to Google Webmaster Tools to see if i've had a reply for my request.

Low and behold i had a reply from mighty Google. It simply stated that there was "no manual spam action" taken on my website, however it must of been an algorithmic penalty that they somehow, for some reason, decided to lift.

This isn't simply coincidence, it's definitely an action taken by Google to remove the penalty. The website has been in the depth of the never regions of Google since the 29th of July 2011.

Why was my website penalised?

Well, i'm almost 100% sure that it was from a competitor who is also in to affiliate marketing. He was always at the top, however i came along and started to compete with him and for some reason he has decided to report my website as spam and, similarly for some strange reason, Google decided to mark the website as spam and thus a penalty was incurred.

There is no other way to explain the penalty, plus Matt Cutts has mentioned that they don't take action on algorithmic penalties. So everyone beware of your competitors!

What steps i took to fight the penalty

In my reconsideration request i simply stated that as far as i knew there were no reasons for the site to have a penalty of any kind. My website offered some valuable content and also had Amazon affiliate links - i didn't state that i was an affiliate marketer, but rather someone who was trying to give the web a dose of high quality content whilst also giving myself a monetization method.

I added a few extra quality pages to my website that i thought offered value to the reader and also made some of the affiliate links on the affiliate review page a little less in your face.

So, those of you have been penalised by Google - do not threat. You need to take a few actions to add high quality pages to your website, ensure that the website is made for the readers and not for your pockets, primarily.

Been penalised for over 2 months? Head on over to Google Webmaster Tools and submit a reconsideration request - they replied to mine within a week and now my website is back where it belongs. I honestly never thought i'd see the day!