Does anyone know how long it typically takes for a given sitelink to go away after you've demoted it in WMT these days? I demoted one page last Friday, and two more yesterday. So far, all three are still showing up, and these aren't simply pages that aren't good entry points to the site. One is a partner page on a subdomain that's basically a copy of our home page and the other two describe events that took place years ago.
I don't know how long I should wait before concluding that my suggested demotions have been refused. I also find it interesting to note that on Google's page about sitelinks they state that
If you think that a sitelink URL is inappropriate or incorrect, you can demote it. Demoting a URL for a sitelink tells Google that you don't consider this URL a good sitelink candidate for a specific page on your site. Google doesn't guarantee that demoted URLs will never appear as a sitelink, but we do consider a demotion a strong hint that we'll try to honor when generating sitelinks.
...which to me reads like a demotion is a request, but in the WMT message you receive after making that request, it says that a user "has blocked" sitelinks. I'd love to be able to actually block them rather than just sending Google a "strong hint."
