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OK guys, that's good enough for me, will not be disavowing. Thankyou to all of you for your help.

Hi again David, I haven't heard of this particular company - could be good if the 40 penalties stat is true, but get your research in and you should be fine. Also check out the Recommended Providers list - there could be some good options on there too.

Hi guys, thanks for the responses. We have used the Screamingfrog tool and spotted a bunch of 403 pages so we are looking into that. Images were all used with permission. I have mentioned the telephone number and address thing to the guy. I have checked about the national geographic link and there was definitely no bribe involved.

Hi David, It sounds like you have had a partial recovery and looking at your other replies below, that the manual action you have applies to the links themselves which means Google have reduced their value and your rankings accordingly. So whilst they may not be actively hurting you, it is always good to have a clean slate and remove manual penalties if you can so that you know there is nothing holding you back from ranking. In terms of your actual question, if you have links that are clearly outside of Google guidelines, you may as well get rid of them if you can. They're probably not helping and if you are able to get rid of them, then it may help prevent any future problems if Google tweak how they treat those links. It sounds like you have recovered a little though with your ranking returning, so removing other links may not be a high priority for you, but like I said, it's good to get a clean slate and be sure that you can move forward building good links with nothing else holding you back. I hope that helps a bit! Paddy

Hi David! We actually updated the UI for OSE so all of our research tools can be found under one section. You should see social metrics after searching a URL/page which looks like this: http://www.screencast.com/t/Q3wmTzOF7wM If you are seeing something different, definitely send us a screenshot and your account information to help@moz.com Hope this helps!

No problems. Be interested to hear what the problem was if you're happy to share?

Honestly, just list out the domains in an Excel file (or google doc) and make separate columns: One column should read "Contacted" and another should read "Link Removed." **note: The domain list should come from multiple sources, not just the GWT list. It is incomplete and untrustworthy. Use Open Site Explorers list and maybe even Majestic/ahref or all of the above. Remove duplicates and sort your list and it should be pretty obvious which are the spam links based on anchor text and domain URLs. Put x's in boxes accordingly. Then just go ahead and take all of the screenshots of email contacts you have and put them in a folder, zip it up, and attach it to the email. That's what I would do. Like I said, the more info you can include the better. As much tracking and data as you can possibly overwhelm them with. They may not look through all of it, but it will definitely indicate to them that you have figured out the problem and worked really hard to fix it. Please keep us posted on how this works. As you may be able to tell this is something I work on often and am very interested in the process and how it works out. I and the whole community would be incredibly pleased if you were able to keep us informed as to how it turned out. Good luck!

I would contact the linking pages to change the link to the new URL... That speeds up the process.

Hi David, OSE usually takes a few updates to include more recent links. Do not worry about the link not showing up in OSE, it doesn't mean you are not being considered by Google. OSE is just an FYI tool, and won't always be able to gather exactly all links.

As there other folks have said billions of web pages is a lot of work. But the question you have is why is the work not done by the time they say it will be done sometimes. They have posted detailed explanations every time there was a problem. (Including this week.) Have you had a chance to check out there posts?

Unfortunately, there has been a delay. We've posted information on the SEOmoz blog about it at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-index-delay-explained.