Has anyone recovered from an unnautural link penalty due to BMR use?

The sites I had that I used BMR on - I deleted the links using BMR's tools when they went down and spent the next couple months getting guest blog links for those sites - they came back, some of them better than before.

Did the sites that come back actually receive the unnatural link email before they dropped?

I'm interested to know if people have recovered sites that actually received the unnatural link email, without removing any links and submitting a reconsideration request.

I'm just sure that many people that are reporting that their sites have come back after dropping... aren't necessarily victims of the unnatural link penalty. They may be victims of Penguin and have recovered their sites by de-optimizing their backlink profiles... but they weren't ever in a "penalty".

So could you clarify that?

Cheers!

Hey Frank

I'm gonna venture to guess you've never actually recovered a site from an unnatural link penalty have you?

The advice you gave is good for PENGUIN recovery, but not sites that have been crushed by an unnatural link warning.

If you think building quality, artificial links, is gonna get you out of an unnatural link penalty then you clearly haven't recovered a site from an unnatural link warning.

One of the penalties for poor anchor text variation (basically all the links to your site had the same anchor text - that is bad). You can change anchor text to fix this, or get some social bookmark packages with varied anchor text.

Im too new to post links, but there's a lot of details on SEOMoz about how to do it. Or use services like Removeem.com, LinkDelete.com if you don't want to do it yourself.

You cant file a resubmission for the penguin update, but you can for unnatural link penalties.

Probably also worth mentioning that when the penalty was revoked all my rankings bounced back in about a week.

BMR went out of business in March, and subsequently removed its entire portfolio of articles (whether you wanted them live or not) through April.

I have 2 sites that are still penalised because of BMR despite all posts being removed and reconsideration requests made (and turned down by Google, despite no other artificial links built). I doubt I'm a victim of negative SEO; rather Google is really holding a massive grudge against anyone who used BMR, or perhaps "most" of us.

In 2012, Google think quality content can only be signalled by quality links only, and that quality content that has quality links AND some spammy blog network links has to be low quality content, hence their permanent penalty for unnatural links.

I can't start my sites again under a brand new domain as Matt Cutts suggest I do. They are branded and already have a following, have printed materials emblazoning their domain name, and yes - they are brands in their own right (sorry Google!). They can survive on their own without Google through word of mouth and other marketing channels, even if Google think they're nothing but scum of the earth spam sites. I guess real human beings think different to the Google algorithm.

John Mu of Google also suggested that if it's the case you're under a permanent penality, then just physically remove the "offending" page altogether to create a 404 error (see here :- seroundtable.com/404-links-google-15427.html) - hmm, not actually very useful is it, especially if its a home page.