I will admit from the outset that my site had a lot of very bad links�but they weren't always bad and in fact when we got them they helped to push us up very high in the rankings. The webmaster we were using convinced us that after the site went live that the best way to get onto Google page 1 was with building all of these links (don't even ask where we built them because I'm sure you can guess the kind of sites were we were linked).
Everything was going great until PENGUIN!!! And then we fell from page 1 to page 25 and then worse. Once we figured out the problem, and fired the webmaster (just kidding cause it was just as much our fault for going along with his suggestions - which worked for a while) we went through every link on the site and even though we tried to get a lot of them removed, most were on dead sites, virus-plagued domains and the like.
We followed the Google handbook on this and used the Disavow tool for every bad domain/link that we couldn't get remove, which were in the thousands. That was about 2 months ago and since using the disavow tool our rankings are even worse, which is hard to believe.
Does anyone have a similar experience? How long do we have to wait until the disavow tool kicks-in and we get our rankings close. I don't expect to be back on page 1 but it would be nice to see a little improvement.
How PBG Would Handle This Problem