Please allay my fears with a manual Google Penalty

Hi guys & gals,

I've looked all over the net for an answer so your my last hope (i hope lol)

So when the 'MyBlogGuest' manual penalties hit, mine was one of them. I had published about 3 posts from authors as a way of having good content on my site. I got an unnatural outbound links manual penalty.

I have done the following to try and do everything;
deleted my profile on MBG
no-followed all the outgoing links that i could
cleaned up toxic links by contacting webmasters and disavowing

Before i send a reconsideration notice, i have my worries about them looking deeper into my site because we sell seo and links. How do i go about playing by the rules and saying the right thing because i feel they will see what we offer and just make things worse. We only do white hat but its still selling links.

Anyone have any experience please? Thanks

That sucks. In my opinion who we link to and why is the pinnacle of free speech online. The fact that the world puts up with Google dictating who we link to and how is infuriating.

My advice would be to take the approach that the company is under new management and the previous management (who has been fired) brought you to this point.

Obviously you can't sell links while asking for reconsideration. Google reads this forum too so don't use my approach verbatim. It sucks that Google makes you lick their balls to get back in the game, but until they have a competitor it is their game and their balls.

Thanks, your confirmation in G being shit makes me feel less worried lol! Cheers m8

Unfortunately there are no easy solutions here. You have limited options IMHO.

1. Remove your site from the index via WMT, and rebuild on a new domain with your old content. Try to repoint good links to the new site.
2. Clean up your entire site (at least temporarily), and ask for a reconsideration request. Valid SEO's idea isn't a bad angle.

Either way it looks like you are going to have to rebuild. I always prefer starting with a clean slate.

Good luck!

Well the weird thing is, that our rankings haven't moved down at all and still getting traffic so it hasn't effected us in that respect. We're at 15 number 1 positions. such a shame

I would also wait to submit the reconsideration request until the Google cache updates with non-offensive content... also exclude the internet archive from your robots.txt

https://archive.org/about/exclude.php

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

This just cleans up some of the lingering traces of the offenses.