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Hey John -

I'm really not convinced there was any negative seo in the sense that the term is being meant of late. I believe our past seo company built blog network links without consulting us. The foreign porn site links are more of a mystery. I'm reluctant to submit a reinclusion request in case they manually make rankings worse, what do you think about that idea? Our site has not tanked, but all major KWs have dropped 5-10 spots. A couple havent budged since getting the letter.

Any comments/suggestions? How long will this stupid penalty last? We never even created the bad links and cant get them removed.

Hi John,

Well naturally, my definition of a 'good website' will be biased. However there are no GWT reported onsite issues, no coding/browser issues, 100% original content, low bounce rate and a high % or returning visitors. We only received the GWT notice of unnatural links and 3 weeks later found quite a large drop in most but not all, rankings. Does this mean it's an algorithmic penalty and if so, how long will it last? We didnt publish any unnatural links on blog networks ourselves, but an seo company we paid money to did, and they have not responded to any of our requests for removal of those links. Ive been able to email some blogs and get a positive removal but the majority have not responded, and there are hundreds.

Is there some certain way to know if youve got a penalty when rankings drop after getting this letter? Is it worth sending for reconsideration if youve got a good website?

Tried that waqid. Was expensive and still our rankings are terrible since 3 weeks after getting the letter. Maybe cause yahoo and botw for instance saw fit to place us on some regional pr0 page that gets cached once a decade. Seems awfully unfair to penalize a site for things they might not have caused, or be able to control.