What would you pay to get specific actionable advice from Google on how to remove your unnatural link penalty?

Russ Ruggles got incredibly lucky yesterday after asking Google’s Matt Cutts on Twitter about his penalty. He tweeted:

Matt said he won’t be doing external emails in March, so there is no way to ask him for one-on-one advice. That is unless you get lucky and tweet him and he has a minute to look.

Matt Cutts responded that it has to do with when he purchased links from backlinks.com, which happened to be penalized in December 2013. Matt tweeted:

Not only did Matt Cutts give Russ specific actionable advice on what he needs to do to remove the penalty. He said he has emailed his team to follow up and potentially remove the penalty. Matt tweeted:

How can you get this lucky? No clue, it is about timing and timing.

Of course the thread Russ made a couple days ago in Google Webmaster Help only helped a little.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help & Twitter.