Our site has been penalized and it's proving to be very hard to get our rankings back...

[LilyRay]

So I have a question.

We have used nearly every trick in the book to rank our site, including a ton of white hat stuff.... but then also a lot of black hat practices that resulted in us dropping in the rankings by about 30-40 positions. And getting back to where we were (top 10 for most keywords) is proving to be nearly impossible.

We have a ton of great content coming off of the site and we actually offer a quality product. We follow most of the guidelines advocated here on SEOmoz. But the black hat stuff we did has really taken a toll.

And it's gonna be pretty much impossible to go back in time and erase all of the Black Hat stuff we did.

So what should we do? Should we design a completely new website with a new domain? What can be done to help?

[Vivamedia]

Hi!

What black hat stuff did you do?

My recommendations are:

• Continue to create awesome content (text, videos and photos)
• Increase your social activity (G+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc)
• Try and get some high quality links
• Remove old crap-links (give signals that you are cleaning up)

Unfortunately, when you´ve broke the Google guidelines, they wont fix everything over one night, you have to keep up with the good work to persuade Google that you are good guys, and that you deserve to rank again.

Good luck!

[LilyRay]

Hey Tommy. Thanks for the response.

The black hat stuff was just paid linking in one way or another.

Working very hard on creating content. I don't even know where to begin to get rid of some of the links we built up.

It's pretty hard to ignite a response from Google Plus users given teh fact that the public in general doesn't really like or want to  buy the product that my company sells, if that makes sense.

[MassivePrime]

Would it be possible for you to contact the people you bought the links from and have them removed?

Also what is the time frame from when you were on the first page to when you dropped?

I think at this point if this has only happened recently then it's too early to talk about building a new website with a new domain. I would add more positives like good content, social activity and quality links while fighting to remove the bad links.