Frost_Angel - 7:47 pm on Nov 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

I received a notice from Google that I had an unnatural linking penalty.

This was about two months ago.

I immediately went to work on removing any links that seemed fishy or low grade. I have 12,000+ backlinks from over 900 domains. I have removed around 100 links (domains) - because most links were site wide type links.

I then sent a reconsideration request late this past Sunday the 4th. Just three days later... today - I receive the:

"We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team."

I'm confused. I was told I have a penalty. And YES, I know there are algorithmic penalties and manual penalties. But the way their initial notice sounded it was indeed a manual penalty.

So now I have spent all this time cleaning up my backlink profile and it was never really an issue?

I'm so confused.
I was hit by Panda in April 2011 and then again in September 2012. I've seen no recovery and my traffic halved by each of the Panda updates mentioned.

I've done an incredible amount of work/improvements due to my first Panda hit.

And then when I got the backlink notice - I thought.... that's weird? I thought the issue was content (Panda).

But before I got the backlink issue tackled - I am hit by Panda 20.

Now I don't know which way to go? My site was a ranking star for 10+ years and it's just steadily fallen since April 2011. I have removed my forum for fear of thin content, I removed the article directory for fear of duplicate content, I removed boilerplate content, removed anything that could be considered "bad" on so many measures. Basically went at my site with a hatchet. Now... I don't know what to do?

I thought for sure tackling that backlink notice was going to free my site of some horrible penalty - only to find out there was never a penalty? And since when does a reconsideration request not take 2-3 weeks?