Need referrals on expert to clean up "unnatural links" and submit reconsideration request

[bizzer]

I just received a manual unnatural links penalty.  I was shocked because other than maybe five links many years ago, I've not done anything to get links.  The site is very powerful in it's own right and buying links is unnecessary.  My first thought was a competitor has done the link spamming on my behalf, any my site is very profitable and the competitors are plentiful and ruthless (i.e. steal my content and use it) since we are #1 for our search term.

I took a quick look at my links (via webmaster tools) just now and yes, in the last few months there are tons of links from very bad looking sites that are I've never heard of.  It's obvious I've been purposefully hit by a competitor. (What's it called when they do this?)

Does Google understand at all that this stuff goes on? Do they even care? On the eventual reconsideration request, if I say that I honestly didn't do those links, would they even believe me or even care?

I have read several articles on what to do now.  But this is so important to my income stream that I don't want to screw anything up trying to fix it, and I want to get it right the first time. Every day is very expensive to me.  So, I'd like to get some recommendations on any experts that can handle this professionally and swiftly. Please let me know of anyone trustworthy that won't rip me off, and if you are such a professional yourself, please let me know.

Thank you

[MarieHaynes]

Either way is good.  Just as an FYI I likely won't be able to respond until tomorrow morning as my little one will be waking up from her nap soon and the rest of today (being a Sunday) is family time for us.  Thanks!

Marie

[bizzer]

Awesome!  I just was looking at your work now.  I will put together some info an private message you here. Or should I just contact you through your website listed in your Moz profile?.

[MarieHaynes]

Thank you very much EGOL.  I'm very honored to have you recommend me.

Bizzer, your case intrigues me as right now I am working on my next Moz article which is about negative SEO.  Google does admit that negative SEO is possible.  However, they say that they work extremely hard to not penalize sites that have had someone else point links at them.  I would be very interested in having a look at your backlink profile, even if you don't hire us to do the job for you.

I have seen hundreds of penalized sites and I have yet to see a case where I felt a site was penalized unfairly.  In cases where a site has been a victim of a spam attack of unnatural links and then gets a penalty, there is usually still a bunch of unnatural links that truly were made by the site owner.  One thing that I do commonly see is site owners that don't realize that they have been making unnatural links.  For example, many site owners have done extensive guest posting in order to gain links and because the guest posts were not on ultra spammy sites they feel that this is within the guidelines.  But you did mention that you haven't done anything specifically to get links, so this may not be the case for you.

Anyhow, I'm happy to take a look if you'd like.

[EGOL]

Marie Haynes is a moz member who has written extensively on unnatural link penalties - much of it published here on moz.

You can see her profile page here. Scroll down to the listing of her posts and note that she writes about unnatural links penalty removal.

She has published multiple times on this topic at Search Engine Watch.

She published a guide to unnatural links recovery here.

Interview here that touches on how she got into diagnosing website problems.

[bizzer]

Thanks. But there is no category to find link audit services.

[KeriMorgret]

We do have a list of recommended companies at http://moz.com/article/recommended that is one place to start looking.