Website Black listed on Google for bad links.

for the first time I trusted a SEO-Company and what they did was idiot link building, resulting in a BLOOP Penalty. I told them already that they should remove immediately all links they built. What are the best steps after a BLOOP Penalty? How long this takes, till the website recovers? (I guess after the crawler comes back?) I got a -100 Penalty :-(. My site has over 780.000 sites indexed but all terms are now far away from page one... I'm sure it's "just" the algorithm penalty, so should this recover after the links are gone? Thank you very much If you can actually remove all the backlnks you created (often challenging) then it's certainly worth a Reconsideration Request explaining what you did. If you can even remove most of them, still do that and try. The worst that happens is you get a note back that there is no manual penalty. How long until the black mark is removed from your rankings is an open question. I've heard of some cases where it happened with the next spidering, and others where it seemed like a set time in the penalty box (60 days). Planet13 I'm sure it's "just" the algorithm penalty, so should this recover after the links are gone? question to the group: How plausible is it that this IS just an "algorithm penalty" as opposed to a manual penalty? I don't have a lot of data to work with but what I do have is from my own site that I study intensely and I recently recovered from -50 after almost exactly 90 days. I wasn't going to remove the backlinks because they were worth more to me than the Google traffic so I just shrugged it off when it hit. But now it has recovered back to where it was pre-links. #:4340647 12:30 am on Jul 18, 2011 (gmt 0) Alex_TJ I haven't gotten around to it yet. They are still doing a bit more work on new additions to the site themselves so I need changes to stabilize first. I then have to add my links and then walk him through synchronizing the pages with his local copies because I'll be working on the live server copies remotely. I have flagged this thread and will not forget to post my observations when it goes live. I'm sure it will help us get an accurate understanding. It may be a few more weeks yet or maybe longer because I have quite a bit of relaxing non-development activities coming up in the next few weeks and will be offline quite a bit (yah!). heuri 5 days left then 90 days are over, my index shrinked from 980.000 indexed pages to 66.000 till now :-(. Hope that at least the penality is over then... smithaa02 heuri...just out of curiosity what did your backlink profile look like? How many links did you acquire in X time? Were there super-spurts in which a lot of links were added in one day with very similar timestamps? How many links did you have beforehand? What percentage of the links linked to your homepage and what percentage to subpages? % that were sitewide links? % that were boilerplate links vs contextual links? What type of anchor text distribution did you have? Amount of c-class and/or IP diversity of backlinks? Amount of whois diversity of backlinks? Name server diversity? Google analtics diversity (did the SEO company use the same google account he edited and/or used GA for these websites)? The amount of information google has to use for counter-seo is scary. They could in theory flag any individual that searches for the term seo and run the sites they visit most often through an audit. Or...google might actually be able to figure out the IP's of users who make edits to suspect sites and create powerful profiling information. Pagerank diversity? Do any of google's IPs show up in your logs (manual review) with a mac browser? Types of sites that backlinked? Page size? Age? Did they link to bad neighborhoods? have you spoken to a reputable SEO Company?Were the sites pretty natural looking to human eyes? Directory type sites? Blogs? Etc... Any information that you could provide could supply helpful clues as to how google's penalties work. Is that considered OVER-OPTIMIZATION, ie spam? A "celebrity" navigation drop-down on all the pages of each of 600 independent celebrity web site. Each site has thousands of news pages, ie drop-down "links" from thousand of pages to each of the 600 web sites. Would Google consider these drop-down "links" as "too many" links? Even though these drop-downs are meant to ease navigation from one celebrity site to the others , ie, not spam at all. Thanks for any feedback, guidance. Would Google consider these drop-down "links" as "too many" links? Even though these drop-downs are meant to ease navigation from one celebrity site to the others , ie, not spam at all. while I don't think anyone could say for sure, if I remember correctly, I think there were a few threads on this site started by people who had done something similar and their whole "network" of sites was wiped out. It might really be a better idea to make things into one big site rather than 600 independent sites. Google certainly seems to have a crush on large, well-branded sites over smaller ones... Building up on brand / business name inbound links only, and coordinating those with a google places account that is registered with the same details reflecting those details on the pages of the website can help in my experience in reducing the length and severity of that penalty. Sourced from Webmaster World