I am not in a position to give a full report on the quality of the backlink profile.
> The original post made it sound like there was no act to clean up.
That seems standard: from innocent to the most hardcore spammer, of course they didn't do anything wrong, Google made a mistake and abused its power.
> If there was spam link building on their part, it changes the story.
It could change this story. But I do not want to point any fingers, and I think Google is smart not to reply on this case (which is kind of a shame. I miss Matt Cutts and I miss the time when HN allowed for these open discussions. It just seems too much of a PR risk these days.)
The term "backlink" isn't part of my vocabulary. I ignore Google ranking or external linking and focus on building useful or interesting things that adhere to my principles.
There was nothing to clean. Lots of websites link to whocalled.us, but I don't pay attention to them, and I certainly had nothing to do with any links to the site.
"Pure Spam If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, it means that Google has detected that some of your pages may be using techniques that are outside our Webmaster Guidelines. The site appears to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or other repeated or egregious violations of Google’s quality guidelines."
My reconsideration request was usually, "You're idiots."
I had a sandwich shop, and the city put up a wall blocking access to the driveway from the main road. They put a pamphlet in my mailbox that said, "Pure Shit," which instructed me to stop doing things like grinding up cats, posting obnoxious fliers on everyone's car windows, and stealing tomatoes out of people's yards.
There was a little box I could write in and mail back to request they restore access from the road. I made sure the shop wasn't doing any of those things, I cleaned it up a bit, and spoke with the Mayor. He said he didn't know why people would want to eat sandwiches, and my shop sucked. My form was mailed back with a "Denied" stamp and the same generic paper about how my shop is "Pure Shit."
"You're idiots." is a reasonable response of someone forced into a situation where their words have no effect, and nobody appears to be reading them. Why waste effort reasoning to those who refuse to listen or acknowledge what you say? Nobody said, "Your tomatoes are tainted because your supplier is a known fraudster." It just said, "Pure Shit."
The original post made it sound like there was no act to clean up. If there was spam link building on their part, it changes the story.