>After identifying all the links which are causing the penalty, they should create a Gmail to outreach to all of the sites to remove the links.
Just slightly curious about this, because I receive these 'link removal' emails all the time for a site I run and have never acted upon them (our comments pages are indexed by google but not linked publicly after we switched to Facebook comments). Is there any reason a website owner should act and remove the links? Surely it's not my/our problem?