I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. My URL is: http://www.maggiesottero.com/ Google will not give us any feed back nor acknowledge the reconsideration requests we've sent informing them of the strides our company has made to remove the offending links. All of which we believe were maliciously placed. Before the penalty we were getting roughly 100,000-150,000 + Pr/M organic visitors searching our brand terms "Maggie Sottero". Total Organic was 500,000+ a month. We received a manual ranking penalty from Google on September 12th: "http://www.maggiesottero.com/: Unnatural inbound links" We have since submitted a full disavow file and 2 reconsideration requests. In response to both of our requests we received the same canned response from Google: Reconsideration request for http://www.maggiesottero.com/: Site violates Google's quality guidelines We received a reconsideration request from a site owner for http://www.maggiesottero.com/. We've reviewed your site and we believe that http://www.maggiesottero.com/ still violates our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages fromhttp://www.maggiesottero.com/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. For more specific information about the status of your site, visit the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools. From there, you may request reconsideration of your site again when you believe your site no longer violates the quality guidelines. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum. As you can imagine, we are incredibly frustrated with this penalty and after researching the guidelines we found that our organization has not engaged in any of the questionable behavior mentioned. We have hired an SEO agency to help us review the penalty and guide us in the actions we can take to resolve this. Based on the investigation findings, we believe that our site has been maliciously targeted by outside sources with what webmaster tools describes as forum comment link schemes. We have not solicited such links and have found thousands of these comment links across dozens of non-related forums. We have taken the following action to attempt our best to regain compliance with the Google quality guidelines: 1. The two domains sending the highest number of links were: 1) bridalproductions.com with 77,066 links and 2) clarksbridal.com with 35,949 links. These sites were former distributors of our product and linked to our collections pages, which made sense for their users’ experience. These sites seem to be We have contacted them and they have removed those links to us. 2. We identified a large list of forum links that were not placed or requested by us. We have attempted to contact the webmasters but without much success. We have created a disavow file for those domains that would not respond to our requests to show Google that we are serious about distancing ourselves from these undesirable links that we feel were maliciously targeted to our site. Google apparently did not find this to be sufficient to come into compliance and they would not advise us on the specific links that continue to offend. On a closing note, penalizing a strong brand on its own brand name when we have not engaged in any offending practices is shocking and disturbing to us. What recommendations do you have to protect ourselves from outside attacks in the future? Could there be a better way to deal with offending links such as not giving them any credit rather than hurting an unsuspecting party? We are anxious to hear your reply,