alika - 3:16 pm on Aug 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

Got the original and new link messages for my main site

From my understanding in the discussion here, if your site didn't really see its traffic decrease after the original message was sent, you don't really have to worry. But you still need to clean your links.

I suspected the "unnatural links" are the blogrolls we have where we put all our list of sites in our right column. We have about 5 sites that cater to this big topic, with the main site being the most general and the other sites focusing on niche areas of the topic. All content of our microsites are original and don't copy any of our sites. We got the unnatural link message only for our main site.

After receiving the first message, I promptly removed all our blogrolls. Then I filed a reconsideration request. Three days later after filing the reconsideration request, I got the 2nd message.

Our traffic never declined during this period.

After 19 days, Google responded to say that "Manual spam action revoked" and in part says that

Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.

I guess I was just surprised that manual spam action was taken against our site. For some naive reason, I thought that the "unnatural links" will be discounted.

Now I know that once you get a message from Google -- even though they try to make it appear that they are not scaring you -- that you should really take notice of it (if not scared).