Google Penalty

[PageOnePowerGang]

Hey there, I am working with a site who recently received an email from Google that they have been penalized.  Since I have only been working with this site for a couple of weeks I know it's from past SEO work.  I tried to pull back links for them and they have 1.5 million of them and every one I look at is a good quality site.

I did notice one thing that stood out and I need your opinion.  They have a blog in which they run about 3 ad banners and about 4 other links site wide creating several thousand links with the same anchor text and seems to be a bit spammy on the page.  However, the blog is owned by them... and the amount of same anchor text links is a very small percentage of their 1.5 million links.

Can you offer a different way for me to attempt to find these bad links?  Could their blog by itself cause the issue?  Please share your thoughts with me about this.

[ChrisDyson]

Site wide Anchor Text Links do look like paid links so that could be an issue.

This article on Moz by Modesto Siotos may help you with identifying the "bad links".

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings

[BenRush]

Whose data set are you using to identify all the links? remember that Open Site Explorer for example is only reporting on a fraction of what exists out there on the internet. There may be lots of bad links, with heavy anchor text that aren't picked up in Open Site Explorer because they aren't deemed important enough sites to be crawled.

Majestic SEO and/or Linkdex will give you a much bigger index size and might catch some additional sites (if you haven't already gone down that route).

Ben

[PageOnePowerGang]

Thanks Ben, but we were using both majestic seo and open site explorer to get a look at as many as we could.  With 1.5 million back links it is almost impossible to see them all anyway. I appreciate your response.