Has Anyone Gotten An Email Like This?

Wow. I haven't gotten anything like this. I've never even heard of this before you posted about it....

I'm interested to hear if anyone else has had this happen.

Whats the email address? Make sure its the actual address and not disguised.

I would first verify if it was a real email from a real Google corporate account. Now if you logged into your webmaster tools account and were greeted with that-- you might have a long road ahead of you.

I would start looking at your link profile and make a notation of the type of links pointing to your site. Do you have any links from high PR homepage's that are completely irrelevant to your site's content or keyword? I would start there if its legit.

I did a search for that email. It looks legit.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Message Forwarding

It says you have links on your site to influence Pagerank. Do you? If so, remove them and then submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. Sounds like they've delisted your site.

I don't use Webmasters Tools because I don't trust Google

Google's automated scanners have been unable to determine the "theme" of your subnet.

Basically, most people link to sites that are similar to their own, with minority exceptions. In the same way, they get links from similar sites.

Google cannot automatically determine what your site is about... even human beings frequently can't do that... but through LSI and other tools, they can tell how similar sites are.

If you write a blog about palm trees, and someone else also writes a blog about palm trees, and you link to one another - Google can tell that your two blogs are about more or less the same thing.

If you link back and forth with someone who writes a blog about pine trees, Google can also tell the two blogs are similar. It can't in any way explain why - the two blogs are both about trees - but it knows that pine trees are like palm trees because of the way people talk about them.

So when you link back and forth with someone who writes a blog about bulldozer tyres, Google goes "wait, what?" because it can tell your sites are absolutely nothing alike.

And a certain amount of that is to be expected. Sometimes you'll interrupt your blog about palm trees to say "hey, I just bought a new car at Roberts Oldsmobile and it is awesome." So Google doesn't expect you to be 100% on topic all the time.

But there's a limit, and it thinks you've gone below that.

Imagine that you are in a room full of people speaking some language you don't know, and they are all having conversations... but somewhere in the room, someone is just randomly blurting out unrelated statements. You can identify this person without having the first clue what he's actually saying, because what he is saying does not sound like a conversation.

Google thinks you're that guy!

The solution is to start having conversations on that site. Look for the conversation, and if there isn't one, start one.

You said you got the same message in your WMT account, so the email is obviously legit. I am surprised that G was so nice to you and informed you, I would say BEFORE they de-listed you.

I would either change the link exchange to a three site exchange (you put a link on another site of yours pointing to a site, they link to your site). If you set up your links like that, they shouldn't be tagged as link exchanges. Or, just do away with the link exchanges all together. G has never liked them and considers them phony, which is what they are complaining about.