Company hit with penalty last year;

Company hit with penalty last year; Google continues to deny requests to lift penalty.
Candy.com has a sweet (and expensive) domain name, one that helped it get instant credibility in the candy industry.
But apparently the site is lacking good search rankings due to a manual Google penalty — and that has led the company to lay off some employees.
Candy.com co-founder Greg Balestrieri posted in the Google product forum for Webmaster Central about the company’s struggles with Google for the past year:
I’m desperately looking for help with my reconsideration request with Google. A few years back we hired a SEO firm that did some bad link building for us. Last year in April our website was hit with a manual penalty and our search traffic dropped off almost entirely. Since that happened we have hired another company to help us remove the links and help with the reconsideration requests. We have removed almost 1000 links and kept well documented notes on Google docs of our attempt’s to remove other links, we also reported all this info in our attempts. We have made at least 1-2 reconsideration request each month since October with the exact same message coming back each time saying that we are are in violation (See Below), even though each month we did more and more work. Needless to say this is hurting our business so much we have had to lay off people. We want to get back on the right track with Google but not sure what we are doing wrong since the emails are the same each time with no clear direction. We even just recently was approved for Google Trusted Stores, we also spend quite a bit on AdWords each month. I just don’t understand how we could not be ranked for the keyword candy when our URL is candy.com (Candy Dot Com)!!! Any help or directions would be great. Thanks!
Balestrieri goes on to write about how the company was number one in Google for the term “candy” for over a year, but now isn’t ranked at all for the term.
I remember seeing the company ranked number one a while back, but I hadn’t paid attention again until seeing the post.
If any SEO experts out there want to weigh in, feel free to do so here or on the forum. Hopefully they can get the issue resolved with Google soon.
- See more at: http://domainnamewire.com/2013/03/25/candy-com-google/#sthash.380TzhTd.dpuf