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I've wondered the same thing, we received the same response as you. And the ranking for the keyword we had been penalized went from page 15 to page 4. However around the same time we increased in rankings we had made some on page changes which optimised the page a bit better for that keyword.

It's hard to tell what exactly has happened!

I'm fairly certain we lost rankings/traffic a little while after the unnatural link warning come through. The warning came through 7/April and I believe we lost rankings later on in the month when Penguin hit. It's hard to tell because the drop in traffic was only a small amount - since it was only one keyword we got hit for.

Sounds like we'll need to try further cleaning up our back-link profile and see if there is anything else we can clean up and go for another reconsideration request?

Hi Marie,

Yes, prior to being hit by penguin we did receive an unnatural link warning from GWT.

So is the warning considered manual, or is it part of the penguin update? When penguin hit we lost rankings for a single phrase, but lost hardly any traffic when compared with the traffic the rest of the site gets.

If we got hit by the unnatural links notification, will a re-submission help?

When Penguin v1 hit, our site took a hit for a single phrase (i.e. "widgets") due to the techniques our SEO company was using (network). We've since had those links cleaned up, and our rankings have not recovered.

Our SEO company said they submitted a reconsideration request on our behalf, and that Google denied it and didn't provide which links we needed removed.

Does Google list links that need removing if they are still not happy with your link profile?