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This has happened to my site - 80 000 (that's about 97% of our total links) + forum account and blog comment spam with exact match text links.  Over 4000 domains.  It's simply not possible to get these links removed.  Most are abandoned blogs or forums that only spammers use.  Alot of them are also non english language sites. I did attempt to make contact with the webmasters of about 100 of these sites, and only got one response. Also as it's not a manual penalty, but an algorithmic penalty google say nothing can be done. The good news is many of the blogs have realized they have a security flaw allowing spam bots to create accounts and post comments and have subsequently deleted all spam comments or even shut the blogs down entirely. The negative SEO campaign continues though - new links are still being added.  I have seen some of my competitors targeted on the same forums / blogs too, a pretty clear sign it's a negative SEO attack. How would one go about discovering the source of the attacks?

Thanks.  I've watched the video before but it's worth reviewing.  Still seems a bit strange that someone can violate terms of service which G never bothered to enforce for years and get slammed with "Double Secret Probatiion" while a malicious site can clean up and eventually get the penalty lifted.  No doubt a malicious site manual penalty should result in a long time in the penalty box but at least it's obvious what to fix.  There doesn't seem to be a reliable consensus or even many case studies on garden variety Penguin recoveries yet.  Not knowing what Dean Wormer wants me to change is irritating.

One more question. So basically if I want ro rank an internal page: mydomain/xbox-360 for "Xbox 360" what should be my main keyword? The percentage of the keyword "Xbox 360" should be under 20%?

I will further add, it is common for webmasters to report competition whom are actively engaged in or can be perceived to have participated in black hat tricks. If the report holds credence then, Google can and will "sometimes" manually ding the account. A GWT warning is one indication of that having had happen. In your case it could be further complications have arose due to the subsequent Penguin algorithm update.

So what do you suggest I do in this scenario, Brent? What's the right thing to do?

If I was going to try to do what you describe I'd probably do it by 301ing another domain (or many other domains). That would explain the lack of backlinks to the main domain. I'd probably also block the crawlers of all SEO tools I knew in the robots.txt of the source domains to keep that profile hidden for longer.  You might be able to get away with "recycling" the source sites a few times as the main domain gets penalised as well. I'd probably fake a load of social signals as well, but I don't see that has been done. Interesting that they put the whole site in a frame too.  Not sure what that is about.

Yeah, this is a huge problem that Google needs to deal with. If it's a directory network, then can you find the owner of it and take action to get them to remove your link from there? Honestly, even if you have to pay them to do it, it will be worth it in the long run because you will be ranking again. I wouldn't be surprised if these links, if they appeared all of a sudden, have tripped the Penguin algorithm filter. Good luck.

Blocking the links in .htaccess won't work, as that's not how Google crawls. If you have the webmaster information, you could maybe send a cease and desist order. I'd also submit a reinclusion request and show them the domains that are redirecting to your site and show them that you do not own these sites. I would also show them the drop that has occurred because of it. Be totally transparent with the reinclusion team.

Visage, those stats seem to say their site is much larger than yours, based on internal links. Your link count from others is small. If some of those are site-wide, then perhaps the number of domains pointing to you is much smaller How does your domain count compare to theirs?

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Hi Pete, Sorry I was referring to the titles themselves. If Google doesn't think that the title is a good match for the query (maybe it contains different keywords or is too spammy), it will select another snippet of text to show in place of the title in the SERPs. This obviously isn't ideal as it takes the control out of your (and you client's) hands.

i dont think it will be down to popularity, more like stronger links to the homepage. have you done a site report on your clients site from seomoz? does it get an 'A' grade? does it have good meta descriptions? if you can't beat them in the SERPS you can still write some great copy for your search listing.

In answer to question 1 - yeah. Happens all the time. They're spammy sites that are scraping the serps to get some relevant content. There is nothing that you can do about it and personally I wouldn't worry about them too much.