Unnatural Link Notification - Third Go Round, specific questions

[icecarats]

Hi all, I'm posting what is sure to be a common question, but I can't seem to find much information by searching Q&A over the last month so thought I'd throw this out there. There's a lot of 'what do I do??' questions about 'unnatural link notification', but most of them are from first timers. We're pretty far along in the process and it feels like we're going nowhere, so I was hoping to pick the brains of anyone else who's 'been there'.

We have a client that we inherited with an unnatural link profile; they were warned shortly after we took them on (around March was the first warning). We compiled an apologetic letter, specifically identified a previous agency who >was< doing bad things, mentioned things would be different from now on, and provided a list of links we were working on to remove based on WMT and OSE and some other sources. This was submitted in early June.

Traffic on the main keyword plummeted; ranking went from top 5 to about mid-page 4.

We got hit with that same rash of Unnatural Link warnings on July 23 that everyone else did and after looking around I decided not to respond to those.

We got a response to the reinclusion request submitted in June above, saying the site was still violating guidelines. This time I went all out, and provided a Google docs spreadsheet of the over 1,500 links we had removed, listed the other links that had no contact info (not even in WHOIS), listed the links we had emailed/contact formed but got no response, everything.

So they responded to that recently, simply saying 'site still violates guidelines' with no other details, and I'm not sure what else I can do. The campaign above was quite an investment of resources and time, but I'm not sure how to most efficiently continue.

I promised specific questions, so here they are:

• Are the link removal services (rmoov, removeem, linkdelete, et al) worth investigating? To remove the 1,500 links I mentioned above I had a full time (low paid) person working for a week.

• Does Google even reconsider after long engagements like this? Most of what I've read has said that inclusion gets cleared up on the first/second request, and we're at bat for the third now. Due to the lack of feedback I don't know if their opinion is "nope, you just missed some" or "you are so blackhat you shouldn't even bother asking anymore".

• One of the main link holders is this shady guy who runs literally thousands of directories the client appears in thanks to previous SEO agency, and wants $5 per link he removes. Should I mention this to Google, do they even care? Or is it solely our responsibility?

Thanks in advance for any advice;

[ThompsonPaul]

That's a really tough spot to be in, Valery - I can sense the frustration!

As far as your last question is concerned, Matt Cutts, in the blog post clarifying the new link warnings, specifically states that you should inform them if a network is charging to remove links:

In a few situations, we have heard about directories or blog networks that won't take links down. If a website tries to charge you to put links up and to take links down, feel free to let us know about that, either in your reconsideration request or by mentioning it on our webmaster forum or in a separate spam report. We have taken action on several such sites, because they often turn out to be doing link spamming themselves.

Have you tried asking for this same kind of help in the Google Webmaster Forum? Wouldn't hurt to double your possibilities - I've heard of some folks getting direct responses there.

It's possible that there was more than just dirty links going on that added to the penalty - assume you've looked for and cleaned up all the other Black Hat techniques that might have been in use?

Sorry, no experience with the link removal services so no help there. The folks at  Link Research Tools have just recently released a nearly free Link Detox tool to look at link quality - might be worth running to see if it flags anything substantial you missed.

I'm sure your patience has just about run out, but I'd stick with it a little longer, especially if the site is otherwise high-value.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes...

Paul