WilliamH

We incurred a site-wide Google penalty around Oct 31, 2008. All our
major terms like "Excel Training Chicago" and “Chicago Flash Training”
disappeared from the 1st page to the 4th page.

Our home page is http://www.trainingconnection.com

We had recently parted ways with our SEO company and my immediate
suspicion was they may have sabotaged us, but realistically I had no
way of proving it and when I calmed down I doubted they would have
intentionally sabotaged us. I decided to contact them and it became
apparent that they we were purchasing links for their clients which
may have resulted in the penalty.

To be safe we hired another consultant to review our site and they
suggest a series of minor changes – which included toning down some of
the keyword saturations, changes to header tags etc – but honestly the
changes were really minor and they gave the site the green light.

We submitted our reconsideration request on Nov 11 and received the
Google auto-reply
“We've received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index
the following site: http://www.trainingconnection.com/
We'll review the site. If we find that it's no longer in violation of
our Webmaster Guidelines, we'll reconsider our indexing of the site.
Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do
review all requests, but unfortunately we can't reply individually to
each request.”

More than 3 weeks have now passed and I have the unenviable task of
having to layoff my first staff member 3 weeks before Christmas.

So I was wondering – am I been too impatient? Is there any harm in
submitting a second reconsideration request as I have more concrete
proof that my old SEO company was following a link buying strategy? Or
can anyone suggest any other changes I need to make to our site?

The lack of response from Google is killing me – is it possible that
they have indeed reviewed the site and simply decided to retain the
penalty without informing me?

I need to do something - but what?????