I haven’t heard of anything like this. As far as I know, you just have to fix and resubmit your business information and wait.

The only way to communicate with Google about local listings, as far as I know, is through the ‘report a problem’ function. Those kind of disappear down a black hole once you submit them, though, and I’m not sure if it’s designed for this sort of thing.

I’d be curious to know what you do to resolve the issue, though!

Hi Hasan. Thanks!

To answer your question, I actually noticed ranking improvements first, which prompted me to check Webmaster Tools. That’s when I saw the message that Google had revoked the penalty. This was about a month after I had used the disavow tool and submitted the reconsideration request. (The message from Google had only been there for a day when I noticed the ranking improvement.)

Thanks for the comment and question Swayam!

My understanding is that the EMD algorithm update was not a penalty, but that it dialed down having an exact match domain as a ranking signal. I would assume that to make up any ranking losses, it’d be necessary to increase efforts on other ranking factors (links, on-site, etc.) so that you’re not depending on the domain name to rank.

You didn’t mention when you got the message from Google? Was it at the same time you regained your traffic?

Best,
Hasan