I have a website where a vendor put about 15,000 backlinks to our site within a 30 day period. Google did a manual review and sent us an auto email through the webmaster tools. I had the 15,000 removed, but we still had about 40,000 backlinks. I sent a request for reconsideration. Google said no, not until we show we made an effort to contact the webmaster for bad backlink. They also told me using the disavow tool is not good enough. I am not planning on looking up and sending several thousand emails. Anyone had this experience and if so what resulted?
It's interesting to see them engage in a dialog with you. Those remaining 40k won't be natural links, right? You may have to pay site owners to remove the links. If they're low quality sites then the owners won't be motivated to maintain their sites just because you got stung.
Oh my. That's a lot of links to remove. It's interesting that Google told you that using the disavow tool wont be enough. Like, are they so serious that you have to reach out to site owners and have those links removed?
Yes, they are serious about you making an effort in removing those links. You made an effort to get those spammy links so they expect you to make an effort to remove them as well. And from what I've heard from many on blogs and forums is that google want to see you putting real effort in cleaning up your act... they are trying to fight the spam and if you help them then they'll help you.
In case anyone wanted to know the outcome. We ended up abandoning the website and starting fresh, even after removing the 15,000 backlinks they did not reindex us. The 15,000 links came from a high PR authorative website. We got penalized because we were doing well and moved to the number one position, that is when there was the manual review. I talked to the vendor, it is a big company, and it took a lot of effort to get to the right person. Eventually I got to someone that understood. Most of the backlinks are now no-follow. They now send backlinks in a much smaller number than their customers, but it was obviously remedy. We were seriously looking into filing a lawsuit. The new domain name is not doing well at all. So the moral of the story be careful with who you do business. They can unintentionally destroy you business. The vendor does not sell backlinks they provide leads and they put our contact information, including phone number, but they also include the website for thousands of cities, but they were all do-follow backlinks.