How do you find bad links to your site?

[tadden]

My website has around 900 incoming links and I have a Google 50 penalty that is sitewide. I have been doing research and from what I can see is that the 50 penalty is usually associated with scetchy links. The penalty started last year. I had about 40 related domains to my main site and each had a simple one page site with a link to the main site. (I know I screwed up) I cleaned up all of those links by removing them. The single page site still exist, but they have no links and several of them still rank very well.

I also had an outside SEO person that bought a few links. I came clean with Google and told them everything. I gave them all of my sites and that the SEO person had bought links.

I gave them full disclosure and removed everything. I have one site that I can't get the link removed from. I have contacted them numerous times to remove the link and I get no response.

I am curious if anyone has had a simular experience and how they corrected the situation. Another issue is that my site is "thin" because its an ecommerce affiliate site and full of affiliate links. I work in the costume market.

I'm also afraid that I have other bad links pointing to my site. Dooes anyone know of a tool to identify bad links that Google may be penalizing me for at this time. Here is Google's latest denial of my reconsideration request.

Dear site owner or webmaster of XXXXXXXXX.com.

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider XXXXXXXX.com for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines.

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from XXXXXXXXXX.com may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.

If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration.

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

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality

[EGOL]

It seems that you are focused on "links" but the message from google is all about your "pages" - which you acknowledge are full of "thin" content.

I'd start removing pages or start writing new ones.  (Google is VERY clear about what they want you to do.)

Lots of ecommerce affiliate sites have fantastic content.  If you are the costume man you should be able to blather endlessly about them with enthusiasm and verve.