wokka - 8:15 am on Mar 2, 2012 (gmt 0)

[Update] Received reply to my reconsideration request, as below!

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index your site. We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.

Does this mean that it is in violation of their guidelines or not - should I stop all link building work with keyword targeted anchor text... or leave this site completely alone and start concentrating on trying to get a 'backup' site ranking?

I'm thinking that if I work on another site, by the time my main site hopefully comes back out of the mist, I'll have two sites performing for me.

But, to be honest with their new Venice Update now showing heavily biased local results within the main results, I'm not so sure any optimisation work is worth it. We run a very small niche mail order business, that delivers nationally, the only way for us to get full UK coverage now is to use..... adwords.

Call me cynical, but maybe this is why everything in the google results, with shopping targeted keywords is geared towards the main national brands, amazon and ebay - to push small companies to advertise with them.

The problem is this: What if there isn't enough profit in the product being sold to cover anyway near the costs of a few adword clicks? Where do you go from there and does this mean that the results are more relevant... Hmm