According to news sources, Google is currently working on algorithms that can monitor bad link building and offer over optimization penalty to the websites with such practices. It is nowhere clearly mentioned what qualifies as over optimization (We had still figured out some over optimization factors in our previous news post). However, it looks like Google has already rolled out the penalty for several sites. Below is a screenshot of the warning that one website has got about the penaltyAs you see, Google has recommended making changes and submit the website for reconsideration. However, even after this red flag the website is still in the index and is appearing on the normal (first page) for the top keywords as it used to be. So is this just a warning? Is it really necessary to send reconsideration through webmaster tools? Based on the reliable SEO blogging sources, a reconsideration request would grab the attention of Google and the bots will have all its eyes on the SEO activities of your website. According to those savvy bloggers this could be just like notifying Google that your website is not right. So, as of now, the recommendation is to stay away from the reconsideration request. Stay away but DO NOT IGNORE!Though the site is still indexed, if there are no actions taken to clear the unnatural links, the penalty would hit for sure as days go by. So you should really start working on clearing the bad links (if you had really built them). Yahoo site explorer was a great tool to find all the incoming links to your website but unfortunately site explorer is no more available. Instead, there are several great applications which can get you all details about the links back to your website. You can even get them classified as blogs, article directories etc. My choice is linkbuilder.wordtracker.com which classifies the linking website neatly so that you can spot the bad links easily.The solution is obviously to remove the bad links, which is not an easy task particularly if the links are from non-moderated sites. As we used to insist, organic and natural SEO always wins and gets you long term and safe results. Hit it hard and get instant results may work for time being but later end up in cleaning the mess.