diberry - 11:55 pm on Nov 12, 2012 (gmt 0)

I never got any WMT "goof" notice either, for whatever that's worth.

This is strange. It would seem to imply that unnatural linking does not necessarily mean you're penalized. Or maybe they send the email out but give you a few months to clean up before penalizing? That way, you would never actually have been penalized, and maybe the clean up you did was the right thing to do.

And yet your rankings aren't getting any better. Sadly, though, I think it's getting impossible to tell when that actually *means* something and when it's just how things are working at Google these days. It's just a lot less clear how they rank us since Penguin/Panda.