Recently, a user on YouTube asked Matt Cutts, chief of Google’s webspam team a question about when the company will support webmaster questions and not just provide automated responses. This user in particular was lamenting the fact that he has only ever received automated responses to his reconsideration requests, even though he always wrote out the issues he faced in detail.
Cutts explains that the main problem they have is scale. With 250 million domain names, there’s no way they can provide individual responses to everyone who has a question or problem with each of them. That being said, that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything to help webmasters get a hold on their SEO efforts.
Their first and primary goal is to return the highest quality web results possible. By default, the concerns of webmasters are secondary. However, they have responded individually to over 400,000 requests in an effort to answer specific SEO questions and to help webmasters better optimize their sites.
While they can’t respond to each and every question from every person who has a website out there, they have tried to create scalable ways to answers common (and not-so-common) questions about building websites, SEO, and everything in between. One way they do this is to make videos on YouTube answering such questions. This way, they only have to answer things once (not a million times in individual emails). These videos get several thousand views, which they are taking as a good sign in terms of getting the word out.
Even so, Google continues to search for new ways to accommodate webmasters’ need for information in a realistic way they can actually handle. In terms of reconsideration requests, they handle them typically in two ways: a notification that the issue is resolved or a notification that there is still work to be done to fix it. In some cases, they respond letting the webmaster know that they’ve fixed one problem but there are other issues that still need to be addressed. It’s not a perfect system by a long shot, but it’s as good as they can make it for now.
Anyone trying to improve the SEO for their website should keep up to date with the videos Google uploads with Matt Cutts answering questions. It’s a good place to start familiarizing yourself with Google Webmaster Tools and to get the help you need.