Hi All, another update:

I sent a message to all the papers i could find that had our spam
links on them. I have notified them of the situation, apologised and
hopefully they will remove soon.

http://www.farawayfurniture.co.uk/images/pennsylvanian_spam_notice.jpg
http://www.farawayfurniture.co.uk/images/pennsylvanian_spam_accept.jpg

Anything else that anyone found that might be considered bad? I am
completely out of my depth now so would really appreciate a response.

I have amended the form to as follows:

-------------------------
Dear Sir/madam,

We are experiencing a massive drop in search results due to what seems
like a penalty on our site www.farawayfurniture.co.uk

We have submitted a previous re-inclusion form thinking that the
problem was cause by a proxy hijack.

After starting the following thread on Google groups
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_...
and reading some of Matt Cutts  and other helpful member's helpful
advice, it seems that our problems were of a much more serious nature
caused by bad practices primarily due to external bad advice and
naivety on our behalf. We are extremely sorry for our actions and we
take full reponsibility for them and the consequences and are taking
major steps to resolve any infractions.

The problems we believe have led to the penalty:

Theme sponsorship - We sponsored themes which were downloaded by
wordpress bloggers to use on their blog. These themes contained our
link in the footer of the page. We had no idea this was against
Google's guidelines. Now we do, we sincerely apologise and promise it
will not happen again.

Reciprocal link exchanges - We carried link exchanges with related
sites.

Forum with some spam from other users - Even though we moderated the
forum daily, it was filling up with user registrations with links to
questionable websites.

Spam Comments on Blogs - We have been pointed to some spam comments on
blogs that link to our site using keyphrases such as 'Dining
Furniture'.

Actions we took:
Theme Sponsorship - We have completely ceased to sponsor themes. Over
the last 5 days, we have spent countless hours trying to contact all
the worst of the themes (porn themes) to ask them to remove our links.
I have sent over 400 emails requesting the webmasters to remove our
link from the footer. We promise to never do theme sponsorships again
Reciprocal link exchanges - We have now completely removed the
reciprocal link exchange pages from our site. We will not do any type
of link exchanges again.

Forum - We have now completely removed our forum from our site. It was
too risky and time consuming and an easy target for spammers. We are
currently developing a blog for the site instead that will showcase
our driver's journeys complete with pictures

Spam on Blogs: I have contacted the sections of the blogs that I have
found up to now and apologised for the actions taken on behalf of
Faraway Furniture. I will personally ensure this does not happen again
in the future!

As already said, we are extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused
and we promise that Faraway Furniture will strictly adhere to the
Google Guidelines in the future.

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On Feb 26, 10:50 pm, JohnMu wrote: