Personally, I think you're better off just being honest with them and let them know you've cleaned up your site.
no one is mentioning trust rank. just y opinion but, your trust rank is hit, and thats probably not gonna recover, even if your pr does.
I don't think the damage is a result of paid links. My site went from pr7 to pr3, but I moved UP in serps.
I never heard of this penalty. Does anybody have a link where this is written? Last I heard Google was studying the problem of paid links, but I didn't think they were actually taking action.
Matt Cutts Confirms Paid Links & Google PageRank Update October 29th, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor Matt Cutts Confirms Google-Slap October 29, 2007 Matt Cutts Confirms that Paid Links Killed Your PageRank October 30, 2007
okay, so I sell links on my site. my pr is down, but I'm up in serps. that seems like a really harsh penatly...
Don't think that Text-Link-Ads can cause that. I use them on one of my most older page, and it's PR wasn't affected at all by them, from what I can see. Bye!
I have requested to text-link-ads to stop serving ads on my blog. Let's see what's their advise. Thanks.
I think it's too soon to take such drastic action. PR is not the only thing determining the value of your site, and especially if SERPs haven't changed (or even went up). Acting impulsively on this would be shooting yourself in the foot with a bullet even bigger than you *think* Google shot you with.
If u used Text/Link sales Google Dropped your Main domain by 1-4 PR Levels based on your damage ( I went from PR3 to PR1 Then back to PR2 , but I have alteast 2700 Backlinks and 300 of them are pr1-7 mainly PR3.. And I was on top of Amazon in many searches and now i dont even get in the top 20s. Anyhow another thing is if you owned the domain example.com and you had a page example.com/tennis/ Only Example.com would face a lose of pagerank on toolbar not /tennis/ from my understanding..