Google contradictory communications about manual action being applied

[mylittlepwny]

Hello,
we received a manual action (partial match) for pure spam for a site of ours. The date is not sure, because we didn't receive any notification in mail or inside Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, so all we can say for sure is that we noticed that the manual action page wasn't empty anymore in 10/03/2013.

Some context: our Google traffic got a big hit on 07/20/2013, losing around 60% out of 250k visits per day. At first we thought it was an algorithmic penalisation related to Panda update. It already happened a few times in the past: losing part of Google traffic and having it back usually a couple of months after, often even better than before.

We were really surprised at first to be deemed as pure spam given that the domain is ours since it was created 7 years ago, that we have never employed black hat techniques and that our efforts were always put into building valuable pages for users instead of using spam techniques to deceive them. But after noticing the manual action, we obviously thought that this was the actual reason for our traffic sudden drop.

So we tried to figure out from the 4 URLs that Google reported as examples of the pure spam affected pages, what issues on our site could have been misinterpreted for pure spam. We also checked all the webmaster guidelines and fixed the issues we thought we could not be fully compliant with. All this process lasted for 3 months, after which we submitted our reconsideration request on 12/16/2013.
On 01/07/2013 we got the following answer:

We've reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that would directly affect your site's ranking in Google's search results. You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view actions currently applied to your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking. Google determines the order of search results using a series of computer programs known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking will happen from time to time as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or if it's performing more poorly than it once did, check out our Help Center to identify and fix potential causes of the problem.

Now we are really puzzled because Google is saying 2 opposite things: We still have a pure spam manual action, and we don't have a manual action (as per their newest response to our reconsideration request).
We could find online a few cases somehow similar to our own, with Google apparently giving contradictory communications about manual actions, but none of them helped to build a clear explanation.

I don't want to enter into the merits of the reasons of the penalisation or whether it was or wasn't deserved, but rather knowing if anyone had the same experience or has any guess on what happened.
What we could think of is some bug or problem related to synching between different pieces of Google but still, after some days, the manual action notice is always there on Google Webmaster Tools and nothing changed in our traffic.

We are now thinking about sending a second reconsideration request asking to update our Google Webmaster Tools manual actions page accordingly to our current actual status.
What do you think?

thank you very much

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry, I'm completely confused - you said that there's no notice of a manual action in Google Webmaster Tools, but the manual action page isn't empty and Google is giving you examples of URLs? If the page isn't empty, then you have a notice of manual action. I think I'm missing something. Did the message come and go in GWT?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Sounds like it is a bug/mistake on their part. I agree with sending a second RR and mentioning the discrepancy between your GWT message and previous RR response. If they send back the same thing (no penalty yet GWT still shows the penalty), I would post to the Google Webmaster Forums with screenshots and hope a Google rep responds.

However, there is probably something going on with your site if traffic dropped so precipitously and you received a message in GWT. I would review the links in the GWT report as well as OSE and look for any possible issues.

[BradyDCallahan]

That story sounds a lot like an algorithmic penalty and not a manual one. I've heard of people receiving manual action messages as a mistake or with a similar story to yours, maybe a Google slip-up?

I'd take a good, hard look at your website from a neutral perspective. Take your bias out of it, regardless if you think you're a company that's only ever done white-hat SEO techniques. Are pages "really" meant for users? Is there information you could probably remove that's "unnecessary" or "duplicate"?

If you have to, hire someone to do this in a consultant role. It'd probably pay off in the long run. Good luck!