Massive rank drop for 'unnatural links' . Help!

[Townpages]

Hi Everyone,

I work for a company called Danbro - www.danbro.co.uk

Recently a massive penalty lead to a huge drop across all keywords in Google including the brand name.

Since we have conducted a massive clean up; (requesting competitors to remove duplicate content, removing some poor quality links etc etc)

We still have not seen any improvement whatsoever nor has Google responded.

Has anyone ever received a positive response from Google? Since we sent a reconsideration request our ranks actually went worse!!

Any advice would be great

[SamPenno]

Hello

I couldn't comment on if anyone has a positive repsonse as I have not had this issue but it may be worth just doing all you can in terms of cleaning up your inlinks and then carry on with whitehat techniques and content development whilst you see how bad the penalty is.

It's probably going to take Google a while to get around to your reconsideration request as there are a thousands of sites affected by this (and google aren't exactly going to dedicate massive amounts of man hours to respond asap when the sites are being penalised for manipulating there guidelines)

How long ago did you put through the reconsideration request by the way?

[stubby]

Are those "useful links" really useful to users?

Or are they there as part of a link exchange?

[Townpages]

Yes - we removed many of the irrelevant ones and we also put no follows on the remaining ones.