[adidash]

You will be surprised by the amount of time people take to work seriously on fixing their penalty.

I have helped over 40 websites recover from Google penalty in the last 7-8 months. 80% of the websites seek help only after they have screwed up atleast one reconsideration request without taking the necessary steps.

Google typically responds to penalty reconsideration requests within a week, often less than a week. So if you have taken the right action and have submitted a really solid reconsideration request, its totally possible to get out of a penalty in under 2 weeks. Also, the backlink count was under 200K which is a reasonably manageable.

Rap Genius could have saved some time using tools like scrapebox to perform some of the scraping activities. But thats another story.