You've got nothing to lose

I could be wrong but I think they said it has to appear if you're trying (Shot in the dark just have a feeling I remember hearing this somewhere)

I'm not sure how seriously they take that if it's just a couple hundred or more than 60% of your links need to be gone

But hey if you get the penalty lifted you get it lifted.

If it stays you're exactly where you are now so... Not much to lose

I had the same issue with one of my sites and it turned out I was penalised for unnatural links on my site, not inbound links. So I stripped all my links and informed Google.

Problem solved.

Remember that Google has to take into consideration possible competitor negative SEO. So their first consideration for unnatural content and links, will be your site. Unless of course your are a massive company generating literally millions of spammy inbound links. That just stinks of black hatters.

Good luck

a diversified link profile can beat that

Unnatural links are those links which are coming from the irrelevant sites.Unnatural links may harmful for a website.You see in Google penguin only those sites are come in effects which having the unnatural links or links created with the help of black hart techniques.

You can collect the email ids of the particular websites from where you are unable to remove the unnatural links and write an mail to the administrator requesting to remove the unwanted links.

If you cant remove the links then just try and dilute them out with good quality links... however GWT will be releasing a tool soon that means you can discredit the links....

That should help fight against Negative SEO :-)

Danny

PS also mixing up your anchor text will do you wonders :-)

For sure man!

You need to prove to Google that you have done what you can to clean up your backlinks. Then, show them what actions you've taken. And be sure to include the correspondence with your SEO company detailing how they won't remove them (or likely can't).

Google wants to know that you have taken serious action to clean up your links. Sometimes it takes a few requests to have them to lift any penalties. I had trouble cleaning up my links at first and then employed LinkDelete to do it for me, after my work + their report I got my penalty lifted.

I think you should build quality links with varied anchor text to make your link pattern look natural. I think building quality links will be better option than wasting time on removing links. Google also understand about negative SEO and I really think that Google is smart enough to give you credit for good links and ignore about bad links because anybody can build crap links for you.

You can do one thing, make the links nofollow which are going from your website.
And, the link which are coming from other websites have very less impact on your rankings.

You can already do that on the Bing webmaster panel. If Google does this it would be a step in the right direction, but a couple of things come to mind:
1) GWT does not show all the backlinks that it has indexed.
2) If someone spams your site with 200,000 links from Xrumer every month, then removing them from GWT would be a never ending and potentially impossible task.

I'd much rather Google just ignore the spam links rather than penalising people for it.

Anyway, back to the original post:
It's worth advising Google of the situation, and in the mean time, just work on building more high quality back links with diverse anchor text.

pardon me, what is unnatural link?

If all your links are stuffed with keywords (especially the same keywords), then it looks suspicious to Google.

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