It appears Google is intent on alleviating penalty fears this month. In addition to the recent introduction of a disavow links tool this month, Matt Cutts recently announced that nearly all sites that receive a manual penalty will be notified about it, as long as they have a Webmaster Tools account. “The intent is to get to 100%, and as far as I know, we’re actually there,” he said.
In other words, Google currently believes all sites are being notified when they receive a manual penalty, but they are being cautious about their language in case a site or two slips through the cracks somehow.
If your site gets hit by a penalty, you can try to fix the problem by correcting the offending issues and submitting a reconsideration request to Google, in the hopes that your rankings will be restored to some semblance of their former glory.
The important thing to recognize, however, is that reconsideration requests only apply to manual penalties. If your site is hit by an update like Penguin, Panda, Top Heavy, EMD, etc, you should not submit a reconsideration request, because there are no manual penalties to be corrected.
Now that virtually all sites are being notified if a human being has reviewed their site and has decided to manually demote it’s rankings, this means that you should essentially never submit a reconsideration request unless you receive a message in Webmaster Tools saying that you have been manually penalized.
Google doesn’t currently notify site owners if their site is hurt by an update to the algorithms. This is because algorithm updates are very common (going way beyond the familiar Panda and Penguin updates we often hear about), and because they affect a very large number of sites. Google does not actually consider these penalties, because they don’t single out specific sites. In order to know if a change in traffic was related to an algorithmic update, you only have two options: check the SEO blogs for news about updates or go to Google’s official blog for announcements. If you see a drop in traffic on the date of one of these updates, and it stays down, there is a good chance you have been hurt by the algorithm.
If your site is demoted by an algorithm update or directly penalized by manual review, your best bet is to improve your quality signals using some of the methods we have discussed on this site. Essentially, you should embark on a non-commercial link bait campaign, remove duplicate and thin content, avoid excessive advertising, and remove spammy links from your site and sites pointing toward yours.
If it was a manual penalty, after doing this you should submit a reconsideration request. If not, you simply need to focus on continuing to improve your quality signals, and wait until the next algorithm refresh to see if your rankings improve.