Google Reconsideration - To do or not to do?

[GoAbroadKP]

We haven't been manually penalized by Google yet but we have had our fair share of things needing to be fixed; malware, bad links, lack/if no content, lack-luster UX, and issues with sitemaps & redirects.

Should we still submit a reconsideration even though we haven't had a direct penalty? Does hurt us to send it?

[GoAbroadKP]

Thanks for the feedback! We are confident that there isn't anything 'black hat-ty' going on with our website; just lots of issues that have been heightened because of the updates this past year or two with no real movement from management to take action.

I was advised by our SEO consultant that we should submit a reconsideration because we have made a quite a few changes but still seem to have no impact, even thought, for instance, we have added over 250 articles to our main directory pages.

I guess I have to have a think on this, it seems from the few comments here, that we don't really have anything to gain, just opening ourselves up to Google's finer comb..

Hmm!!.... Thanks! SEOmozers

[Jantaro]

We have filed a few reconsideration requests in the past, and in all but one case I have received responses about there being no manual penalty.

A few years ago we had a site that had been manually penalized, but we did not know about it (no notification was sent to us through Google Webmaster Tools). After we sent a reconsideration request, the manual penalty on this site was removed.

For the sites that did not have a manual penalty, we have not seen any impact (negative or positive) as a result of the reconsideration request.

Since you know about several issues that are hurting your SEO performance, in your case I would likely work on those before contacting Google. I have only contacted Google for sites that I believe don't have significant issues.

[Doc_Sheldon]

As Mat said, you could be risking more scrutiny, so if you submit a recon request, be sure you can endure the attention your site will get.
However, I can see no possible gain to doing so. So why bother? All you'll get out of it is a message saying they found no manual action against your site, and advising you to check for other possible causes of a loss of traffic, yada, yada, yada...

[matbennett]

If you are (REALLY) confident that there is nothing off-white going on with your site and it's links then you theoretically have nothing to lose.  Whether or not there is anything to gain is an oft-discussed point.

You would though be inviting to |Google to look manually at your link profile, so if you aren't so confident then there could be lots to lose.

For my money I wouldn't do a re-inclusion request without having received a penalty warning. If you haven't got a manual penalty then there is nothing to remove, so I don't see any gain.