I have a site that's got two manual penalties in Google Webmaster Tools: one for "pure spam" and one for "user-generated spam" (no link penalties currently - this is just for on-site stuff).

In the example URLs for the "pure spam" penalty, every single URL listed is in the site's /blogs/ directory. That entire directory and every URL in it has been giving a 410 response code for more than a year. I have also done a site: search to confirm that no URLs in this directory are remaining in Google's index.

I've submitted two reconsideration requests asking that the "pure spam" penalty be lifted, explaining that I've 410ed the entire directory in an effort to eliminate entirely all the spam on the site.

The first reconsideration request was on 6 October 2013 and eventually I got this message back on 24 October 2013:

We received a reconsideration request from a site owner for (site).

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our quality guidelines, and revoke or adjust manual spam actions applied to the site if appropriate. You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view actions currently applied to your site.

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.

This led me to believe that nobody at Google actually read my reconsideration request and checked to verify that I had cleaned up the site.

So I followed up with a new reconsideration request on 18 November 2013.

Sure enough, on 12 December 2013 I received this message again from Google:

We received a reconsideration request from a site owner for (site).

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our quality guidelines, and revoke or adjust manual spam actions applied to the site if appropriate. You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view actions currently applied to your site.

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.

Can anybody tell me what it will take to get someone at Google to read my reconsideration request instead of just waiting a few weeks and then sending me boilerplate autoreplies?

In particular, speaking just about the "pure spam" penalty, I'd like one of two things to happen: either give me a list of example URLs that are affected that aren't returning a 410 status code, or lift the penalty.

ps. If it would be helpful, I'd be happy to share the site's domain and the full text of both reconsideration requests with anyone at Google or with anyone else who can help.

I have a site that's got two manual penalties in Google Webmaster Tools: one for "pure spam" and one for "user-generated spam" (no link penalties currently - this is just for on-site stuff).

Pure spam:

Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

User-generated spam:

Pages from this site appear to contain spammy user-generated content. The problematic content may appear on forum pages, guestbook pages, or user profiles.

In the example URLs for the "pure spam" penalty, every single URL listed is in the site's /blogs/ directory. That entire directory and every URL in it has been giving a 410 response code for more than a year. I have also done a site: search to confirm that no URLs in this directory are remaining in Google's index.

I've submitted two reconsideration requests asking that the "pure spam" penalty be lifted, explaining that I've 410ed the entire directory in an effort to eliminate entirely all the spam on the site.

The first reconsideration request was on 6 October 2013 and eventually I got this message back on 24 October 2013:

We received a reconsideration request from a site owner for (site).

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our quality guidelines, and revoke or adjust manual spam actions applied to the site if appropriate. You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view actions currently applied to your site.

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.

This led me to believe that nobody at Google actually read my reconsideration request and checked to verify that I had cleaned up the site.

So I followed up with a new reconsideration request on 18 November 2013.

Sure enough, on 12 December 2013 I received this message again from Google:

We received a reconsideration request from a site owner for (site).

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our quality guidelines, and revoke or adjust manual spam actions applied to the site if appropriate. You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view actions currently applied to your site.

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.

Can anybody tell me what it will take to get someone at Google to read my reconsideration request instead of just waiting a few weeks and then sending me boilerplate autoreplies?

In particular, speaking just about the "pure spam" penalty, I'd like one of two things to happen: either give me a list of example URLs that are affected that aren't returning a 410 status code, or lift the penalty.

ps. If it would be helpful, I'd be happy to share the site's domain and the full text of both reconsideration requests with anyone at Google or with anyone else who can help.