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Would it be less time to get a new domain name and start over?

I'd like to think that it's not quite at that stage.  Regardless, it would be nice to know what exactly had been done so we could ensure that it just wouldn't happen again.

I lose sleep at night worrying because I posted in the World Rock Paper Scissors Associations Website's forum a comment about a bankruptcy lawyer.

Waaaaaaa?  I'm really worried now.  Ryan, when you say there is actually such an association are you talking between such a site and Refresh Cartridges?

Hi Ryan,
Thank-you so much for such a helpful post.  I've removed the links from refreshcreations.co.uk, computerarticles.co.uk and vatloophole.co.uk with immediate effect.  These are all sites which I own so removing links to my 'baby' felt a little bit gutting but as the links were all sitewide it is entirely possible that Google saw them as being manipulative.  I'm assuming that once they confirm that they are no longer penalising us that I could reinstate the links with a nofollow attribute?

With regard to the link for http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Digital_Technology_for_Graphic_Design I have e-mailed them asking to be removed but I don't hold up much hope for them doing so - God knows where this link came from!  Rather naively I'm hoping that Google isn't worried about an odd link here or there on a PR0 site which I have no control over so will now request reconsideration and see what happens.

Just to confirm, am I correct in saying that article writing is still alive but that the articles should be relevant and of a good quality but only include a link to the site in the 'about the author' section?  I only ask as this was going to be our next project; writing high quality articles for various technology sites with a link back to Refresh Cartridges.

Am going to have a thorough look through your http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012 post now and the comments and ensure there's nothing else we can do.

Thanks again for your help.

Hi,
We’ve recently received a Google notification of unnatural linking along with a confirmation that we're being penalised.  There were a few other sites that we owned that perhaps had too many links pointing to our main domain so we trimmed them down and submitted a reconsideration request and got the following back:

"Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"

I want to stress that we have never in the past and do not currently buy any backlinks.  The problem that we face now is that our site has been online for best part of a decade, there are thousands of people linking to us and I have absolutely no idea where to start.

We don’t use an SEO Company but in the past few months have been using SEOmoz to improve our on-page optimisation.  I know it’s a massive ask but if could a member of the SEOmoz community or a staff member quickly take a gander and let us know if anything in particular sticks out like a sore thumb it would mean a great deal to me.

Of course, if needed we’ll employ the services of an SEO company but I’m hoping one of you guys will see something immediately obvious that could really help us out!

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards

Chris

That's great; many thanks.

Have removed all the potentially offending links and request reinclusion.

Kind regards

Hi,

We have been using SEOmoz for a good few months now and have found it incredibly useful.  Unfortunately however I think we may have slipped up a little bit as we have just received the following message in our Google Webmaster Tools:

Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/

I have a funny feeling I might know what the problem is but I'd like a confirmation before I potentially go off on a wild goose chase.

We also own the domain name www.computerarticles.co.uk and recently started introducing the author at the bottom of the post along with both a link to the website homepage and a link to a deep, popular page on our website.  For example, check out http://www.computerarticles.co.uk/twitter-time-saving-tools/

We genuinely didn't realise this was a bad thing and thought it would just provide Google with a way of deep linking straight in to popular areas of our site.  I would really appreciate advice as to whether you think it might be these links that are causing the problem or whether there is something else that could be causing the problem.

In the event it is these links that are causing the issue would you recommend removing the entire 'about the author' page (as we have published around 500 pages on that site) and simply put a link in the blog roll or simplify it to just link to the homepage.

I appreciate in advance any help you could give.

Regards

Chris