How many different penalties are there?

[internetheaven]

I have many sites. One site, seems penalty prone.

Panda dropped it to around the 300 mark in the SERPS.

Then Penguin hit and it practically vanished from the SERPS.

Now it is in (what I would use to call) the 30+ penalty position. Does that even exist any more? According to SEOMoz, my SEO profile smacks the daylights out of my competitors.

I have not changed anything that I do or removed any backlinks, yet Google cannot seem to make up its mind as to what penalty should apply. It seems adamant that a penalty SHOULD apply though.

And re-consideration requests are met with templated responses about how my backlink profile looks un-natural. I can see that it does. There are 3 sites from Russia linking to me from every footer area of their sites. Over 150,000 links all with the same anchor text.

Google state they want explanations and I tell them that I did not ask for those links and the webmasters do not respond to requests to remove them. Google are un-interested in actual explanations. I don't think a real person is even checking reinclusion requests any more. Clearly no-one would ask for those links. And clearly if they could be removed, I would have done so considering the currently link-hating Penguin climate.

[Frost_Angel]

I am in a similar situation. I was hit by Panda in April 2011. Never once did I think it was my backlink profile. (My site is a mommy blog). So for the last 18 months I worked on a redesign, moving the site to wordpress, fixing a thin content issue that was being generated by a script I was running, improving on page SEO, building social media, building brand, building subscriber list.... pretty much all the things you should be doing.

None of it was working... my site was actually worse off - even though in SEOMoz I should have been sitting pretty compared to who was ranking.

I submit a reconsideration request in early September. Two weeks later I got this.... "unnatural linking" blah blah form letter. I was like "what?"

So I really look at my backlink profile... yep - sure enough... some serious crap/spam there.

I have worked aggressively to get these links removed and there is either no contact info, or when you do contact they don't answer. Or you contact the host with a DMCA or even just a polite letter and they tell you to stick it.

So what do you do? Google asks for proof and explanations of your efforts. Which I plan to give with next reconsideration request - but even then - will I get some automated blah blah again that's not helpful?

Seems as if they are basically telling you to suck it in a form letter.