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Hi, thanks all. We actually employed a so called reputable seo firm to improve our rankings and 12 months on and several thousand pounds lighter this is what we are left with. I've noticed that many of the sites are almost identical in terms of their design and domain name. Even some ip addresses are the same so it looks like a content farm to me. I think I'm better trying to get them removed, hopefully some key somewhere can delete our site from their db and remove all of them in one go, it's never that easy tho I suppose. Amazing that you can give people money in good faith to promote your site and secure quality links and this is what we and up with. Thanks for your input tho guys

This is the latest message we have from them from webmaster tools. We never had an actual notification of a penalty but our 1st page ranking for Workwear dropped to page 20 overnight. All other rankings suffered as well:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www../,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www../ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

I'm looking to clean up my back link profile as we have a Google penalty for unnatural linking. Any pointers on what I should be looking for in terms of what makes a link bad? We have a massive percentage of links under the anchor text of "workwear" and this is the keyword we have the penalty for. Is it better to get the links removed or the anchor text changed? Thanks