Hello IM Rubbish,
You are in a unique situation (assuming that you are not an affiliate marketer). A large majority of people getting the message are seeing only minor changes in their rankings (Even after the 2-4 week lag time). Getting the notification does not mean that your are going to lose rankings or get a penalty. There are a lot of cases where webmasters (or their SEO's) never built a single link and are still getting the message. The majority of people who are loosing rankings are only loosing rankings on a few over-optimized keywords, and on a limited number of pages.
In the case where someone has lost a ton of their rankings because of massive low quality link building and over optimization (and in many cases low quality websites), I still do not suggest submitting a re-consideration request. Most of the rankings that were lost were because of devalued links not because of a penalty. And most trust penalties/filters are short lived. If your site has lost that many rankings, inviting Google to do a full manual review of your site is a very bold move, and you must be prepared to do a ton of work to get a positive answer (most people are not getting positive answers even after spending weeks and hundreds of man hours to "clean up" their links). And here is the kicker, getting a positive answer is not going to cause Google to revalue the unnatural links, so your rankings are not going to rebound as much as you might hope. They may shorten the length of the trust penalty, but the trust penalty is short lived anyways (It must be short lived else competitors could easily wack eachother). You don't need Google's written forgiveness to rebuilt trust, you can do that by building better content, being socially engaged etc.
Here are 2 scenarios to illustrate my point
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Scenario 1 - You contact Google, they tell you that you have "Unnatural Links". You go about removing whatever links you can that you believe to be unnatural. You reply to Google and they respond telling you that you still have unnatural links.. Repeat multiple times and still not get a positive answer from Google. This is what is happening to most people.
- Result - You have removed a ton of links, some of which were likely still helping you, and Google still ignores your plea. But now you are marked as a admitted offender and have been manually reviewed, which only makes it tougher to recover. On top of that you have spent time that could have been spent improving your site, which would ultimately have a much longer term impact on your trust/rankings, and also reduce chances of future dips in rankings due to unnatural links.
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Scenario 2 - You do the above steps, but instead you do finally get a positive response from Google. Your rankings are still not going to bounce back to where they were prior to the devaluation happening. Google is not going to revalue links its automated algorithms have devalued.
- Google may remove/shorten the trust penalty which will help slightly with your rankings, but it will not get you back you original rankings. and again, most trust penalties are 1-3 months long. And even that time can be reduced if positive trust signals are introduced.
