Cleaning up after Penguin | Next steps?

[godreamvacations]

Background:
We've come to the realization that Google's Penguin update back in 2013 has penalized us and are just now attending to the issue. We had subscribed to a link-building service for years and just recently cancelled their services. Unfortunately those links are still out there. We've submitted a disavow list to Google on January 14, 2014; but there is no way to tell when/if they processed it.

Our homepage used to rank in the top three listings for our main keyword, but now we're somewhere around #31 on page 4. It's not even our homepage that ranks any longer either; its a page specifically created recently that is tailored to our main keyword.

What I've Done So Far Using MOZ, I determined our homepage was using our keyword 53 times in various ways; so I dwindled that down to 27. I built a new page tailored to our main keyword that apparently is ranking in Google as #31 now; not gaining any placement at all though. I've implemented canonical tags in the

<header>of most pages (usually just linked to itself to minimize duplicate pages being detected from URL variables and such). I've worked on Title and meta description length issues.

Duplicate Content?
We sell hotels, so we have a ton of internal links 500+ hotels, linking to/from one another. One page might have 100 hotel links (all internal). Another category page might be duplicating half of those links. For example, we have 200 all-inclusive resorts, so they are listed as links with the hotel name and a short description. On an adults-only page, we have 100 resorts, but 75 of them are the same resorts as on the all-inclusive page; so it may appear like duplicate content. << Not sure how to combat this. ?

Too Many internal Links on Homepage?
Our homepage: navigation bar has 68 links, rest of page has ~74 links. I've read that that's too many and other people say it's fine as long as your page has textual content that is long enough. Any thoughts?

Domain Name Change?
An SEO company that we talked to said they would transform our site into a Wordpress-based site for SEO reasons and that we should change our domain name; thus starting fresh and ridding us of the bad/spammy links that are coming to us. They also said they have several high-quality ranking pages that they would write articles on and link to us.

Considering we don't have many good links to our site to begin with, what are your thoughts on a domain name change? It's drastic and we're not that open to the idea (yet).

Would the SEO's link-building technique be what MOZ is talking about in his video 7 days ago. If so, I think that's a scary route to take; especially when after we stop the SEO's services, they said our links would come off those pages. Won't google see that happen and flag us as using black-hat tactics?

As for Wordpress; we have 500+ hotels.. so that's doable, but a chore in itself. If our CMS code and website can be cleaned up some I think our custom CMS is fine for SEO. Any WP fanatics out there think WP is good for 700+ page sites? *we already have our CMS programmed to pull data from vendors; so that code would need rewritten also to work with WP.

Analytics Data
I reviewed Google Analytics closely looking at the google organic traffic closely from Jan 2012 till now and I don't see any sudden drops; just gradual decreases. Is this normally the case for Penguin-hit sites; or shouldn't there be a sudden drop in organic traffic?

If you've read this far; THANK YOU. Any comments to the above questions are appreciated.

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