crobb305 - 10:03 pm on Mar 9, 2010 (gmt 0)

yeah whitenight it was a domain-level penalty. example.com is listed with 8 sitelinks, but removing the TDL suppresses the domain name (and all key phrases) 40 to 60 spots, depending on data center. The site is 5 years old, so I can't imagine having to sift through thousands of backlinks, many of which I have never requested, appearing on crappy domains, scraper sites, sitewides, blogrolls, etc. I had hoped my filtering was related to significant canonical issues (that I mentioned on the previous page of this thread under steveb's comment). All technical issues were resolved, and a reconsideration request was made via WMT (9 days ago), but I haven't heard anything yet. I guess my next step, as you suggested, is to tackle the link profile, but that could take months. I wish WMT had an option to select and ignore certain backlinks.