A Note From Google on Unnatural Link Penalty

Those who have been hit by an unnatural link penalty from Google, and are honestly attempting to get the issue fixed, will be relieved to know that according to Googler John Mueller's response in the Webmaster Help forums, Google is willing to work with you a little bit to ease off the penalty.

One webmaster asking for help stated that they had removed about 85% of their unnatural links, and were unable to remove some of the rest due to abandoned or mystery accounts. John replied with the following:

"With 85% resolved, it sounds like you've covered a lot of ground already! If there are links that you're absolutely not able to remove, I'd document that with a reconsideration request along with the issues that you've been able to resolve".

Though some are seeing this as a percentage threshold for the minimum amount of work needed to get a penalty lifted, it seems unlikely that Google has a definitive number they would openly admit to, and John only used that number because it was an estimation by a webmaster. However, it does show if you can prove to Google that you've made significant progress to fix the issue that they will consider your request for a penalty to be removed.

But wait there's more! John also responded to another webmaster question in the forums where the webmaster had made significant progress towards removing inorganic links. The webmaster received the following message from the Search Quality Team and wondered what it meant:

"After re-evaluating your site's backlinks we are able to partially revoke a manual action. There are still inorganic links pointing to your site that we have taken action on. Once you've been able to make further progress in getting these links removed, please reply to this email with the details of your clean-up effort."

To which John replied:

"That usually means that the team has been able to remove a part of the manual actions being taken due to the changes that you've made. It sounds like there still are some issues that you might want to review & resolve though. Generally speaking, it can take a bit of time for these kinds of changes to bubble up, and to be visible in search results, it would be rare to see a jump right afterwards. My recommendation (not knowing the specific case/site) would be to follow the advice of the search quality team ...