Has anyone seen direct improvement after April 23 by requesting reinclusion?

[tvw130]

Using the open site explorer I have figured out that my former seo agency was buying name spam (mostly Asian sites)for my main keywords and did the same in a private network of blogs.  I don't speak any eastern languages and seo Super Dude has left the planet.    So... I don't really have much to report to the Google Webmaster folks.

How much time - effort- cash do invest in removal requests vs, redo the whole darn site and hope for the best?

All the best.

Tom

[MoosaHemani]

In my personal opinion language shouldn’t be a problem as English is considered to be the universal language amount the IT dudes in Asia (At least I think that way...)

How much time, effort and cash to do the link cleanup... I believe this is very much depends upon how you want to go with the cleanup process... I really like this post regarding that by Cyrus Shepard http://cyrusshepard.com/boom-1-email-60-bad-links-gone-4-tools-for-easy-link-cleanup/

This post will help you identify how much time, effort and cash will be required to complete the cleanup process.

Hope this helps!!

[AdamThompson]

Here is another way to look at it:

If you could delete all the low quality links to your site, how many really good links would you have left? If you wouldn't have much left, you should probably start over, and work on building high quality links.

[IanTheScot]

I went through OSE a few months ago and got together a list of about 40 domains that we had never asked for links from and were just spam.

I wrote to all that I could asking for removal and then put everything in a spreadsheet and sent it to Google. Two weeks later I was informed that a manual penalty had been removed.

Our organic Google traffic is now up over 150% from last year.

For us it was worth it.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

For some reason I can't "thumb" up any comments, but these are all good answers.

In Ian's case, 40 domains is a reasonable amount. Most websites will have many more than this, often in the 100's or 1000's of spammy, low-quality links that they paid for over time.

Also, there's no guarantee Google will ever lift the penalty, even if you remove 100's of links and submit multiple fully documented reinclusion requests to the Google Web Spam Team. I've known SEO's that have literally sent 1000s of emails and removed 100's of links to no avail. I've also seen smaller sites remove just a handful of links and their rankings bounce right back.

Here's how I would tackle the problem:

1. Do you think you can reasonably remove 60-75% of the links? Or at least have a VERY good reason why you can't? Anything beneath this level and you'll most likely be fighting an uphill battle with Google.

2. In some cases, even if you've been penalized by bad links, some of those bad links still help you - even at reduced traffic levels. So you may be penalized, but you're still seeing more traffic than you would otherwise. In a few cases it's not worth it to remove the links at all.

3. Finally, as Ian said, how many good links do you have? If the sight is truly burned, can you walk away from the good links without too much regret? If the answer is yes, it may be time to start over.

There's no right answer for all circumstances, so weigh your options carefully.