I have just received an email from google regarding a recent google reconsideration request for a friend's online glasses website that I have been doing a small bit of SEO for. The website used to be highly ranked number for search phrases like Fashion Sunglasses, Bench Glasses and Patterned Contact Lenses (against my advice, he went ahead with having fashion contact lenses put on the site, which I said would dilute SEO, but thats a blog entry for another time).

A few weeks ago, the rankings for most of these keywords dropped. I thought it might be possibly because of over optimisation of the site, but since version 2 of the website was put online, (basically a reskin with better SEO and  URL rewriting strategy) this issue has been addressed. I put in the reconsideration request to google last week and expected it to be several weeks before hearing anything (if at all). To my surprise, I got an email from google today saying that my reconsideration request had been processed:

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.onlineglassesstore.com/.

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.

This is an automated message from Webmaster Tools. Please do not reply to this email. For help, please visit http://www.google.com/support/webmasters.

This was very quick, I'm impressed by the speed at which this request was processed. Ostensibly, the rankings for the site do not appear to have changed, however, the number of google referrals increased by 70% yeasterday, and the number of visitors (according to google analytics) increased by a similar amount. 

My current theory is that the ranking penalty applied to a number of datacentres but not all, so the rankings do not seem any worse (or any better) but that the long tail keywords have improved in ranking - possibly more so for non UK datacentres.