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Google Webmaster Tools is handy to use in conjunction with the other tools listed. Also, SEO Powersuite's SEO Spyglass tool is pretty decent.

Hi Daniel, I hope that by now your penalty situation has been resolved. Was just a little concerned when I read this thread that there might be a little confusion over the need to remove those paid links from your site. I just wanted to clear this up for any new people reading Q&A who might take away the wrong idea from the thread. If the paid links are now nofollowed, you don't need to remove them (unless they are serving no other worthwhile purpose). Matt Cutts talked about this in the webmaster help video Why do paid links violate Google's guidelines while other ads don't? As Matt explains in the video, there is nothing wrong with having paid advertising on your site, as long as there is disclosure (usually in the form of a nofollow tag). For those who might be reading this thread because they too are wondering what to include in a reconsideration request, we have created a Checklist on our site that might help. http://www.rmoov.com/google-reconsideration-request-checklist.php Hope the penalty is now far behind you, Sha

Sorry, I don't think I explained very well :). I was recommending that you didn't redirect these pages to the homepage of the other sites, but instead selected the most relevant page on the other sites and redirected to these. That way you would still take advantage of all the relevancy benefits.

Good stuff, let me know how you get on. Have you done any analysis on which anchors are causing the problems? That is, which keywords has the site lost traffic for? If you do a compare between the two weeks before and the two weeks after the penalty and look at the organic keywords in traffic sources you can see the specific ones that have dropped in traffic. This will give you more input into which anchor texts are problematic so you can dig further into the link profile. Anyhow, do let us know how you get on. Cheers Marcus