One of our websites has suffered ongoing manual action by Google due to a high volume of unnatural links. This was somewhat justified as an SEO company we hired in 2005 submitted our site to numerous link farms and low quality sites.We're now trying to cleanup this mess and have so far submitted around 8 reconsideration requests after disavowing tons of domains. The problem is Google are still kicking back our reconsideration requests and the last URL they highlighted was this one.http://cutesoft.net/forums/post/8567.aspxI really can't see how this falls into the category of web spam? CuteSoft is a well known WYSIWYG HTML editor. Is it really a crime to put a link in a forum signature? If so most forums should be classed as spam. This was a genuine post I made years ago seeking help on a particular subject relating to the software.I just can't workout the logic behind what they determine as spam anymore!? EDITI can only conclude that Google are far more advanced in detecting the subtleties of stuffing keywords in anchor text than I possibly imagined! I'd love to know how Google are generating their reconsideration responses, if they know all the pages that contain spammy links why can't they just ignore them in their algos? They've already pushed our position for various keywords off the first 10 pages. So cleaning up these keyword based links almost seems like a pointless exercises!?Also some reconsideration responses contained links with our company name in so really I am none the wiser?? Their criteria most go beyond simple keywords stuffing!
How can this be considered as web spam?
seo;google;google search console;penalty
The problem is not the forum signature itself, it's the fact that the link is optimized. If instead of Company Registration you had your company's name as the anchor text for the link, it'd be fine. If detected, all forum footer comments with optimized keywords in links are classed as spam, or more specifically link schemes as as defined here:Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases  distributed on other sites.The logic has always been clear I believe, they are just so much better at detecting it now.