Google Penalty due to external links

[netbuilder]

• On Sep 3, we got a Manual Action by Google: unnatural links to your site

• Immediately we arranged to have all those links the rel="nofollow" atttributes, these were links set by our customers since we are hosting providers.

• We sent a reconsideration request to Google on Sep 8 and this is their answer: 
  We’ve reviewed the reconsideration requestfor xxxx and modified its status, but we still believe that content on your site or links to your site are outside our quality guidelines. No more info provided. - We double checked everything but could not find anything else that could harm us so we asked Google (in a new reconsideration request sent on Sep 11 to provide us some samples.

• On Sep 24 Google answers with a sample of 3 sites which contains links to us. After verification, all the external links to us have the rel="nofollow" attribute !!

• Today the manual action is not anymore a side-wide one but a partial one and applies to unnatural links--impact links.

So it seems that we need to physically have those links removed? As well I checked https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604772?ctx=MAC  and he does not refer at all about setting the rel="nofollow" attribute, Looks like Google wants the full monopoly on text links.

[SilverDoor]

Great answer with some quality humour. Love it!

Thumbs up for you sir!

[TomRayner]

Google can be pretty anal about these things.

You'll increase your chance of a penalty removal if you physically remove the links and show evidence of your work and progression.

I can't really put it better than this guide on penalty removal by HitReach.  They've removed hundreds (or thousands) of penalties and this is their methodology.  Having done something similar myself, I can vouch for it, so I highly recommend reading it and implementing it.

And just for fun, here's a comic of theirs

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