Manual Penalty Question

[artdivision]

Hello dear MoZ community,

I have already communicated this problem before but now it reaches to a level I have to make some hard decisions and would like your help.

One of our new accounts (1 month old) got a manual penalty notification few weeks ago from Google for unnatural link building. I went through the whole process, did link detox and analysis and indeed there were lots of blog networks existing purely for cross linking. I removed these and the links got decreased dramatically. The company had around 250,000 links and truth be told if I go by the book only 700-800 of them are really worth and provide value. They will end up with roughly 15000 -20000 left which I acknowledge are a lot but some are coming from web 2 properties such as blogger, wordpress etc.

Because the penalty was in some of the pages and not the whole web site I removed the ones that I identified were harming the web site, brought the anchor text down to normal levels and filed a very detailed reconsideration request and disavow file.

I do not have a response so far by webmasters but here is where my concerns begin:

1. Should I go for a new domain? losing 230.000 links ? How can there even be a "reconsideration" request for a web site with 85% of its link profile being cross linking to self owned directories and web 2 properties?
2. If I go for a new domain should I redirect?
3. Should I keep the domain, keep cleaning and adding new quality links so I take it with a fresh new approach?

Thanks everyone in advance!

[MichaelC-15022]

My answer to this would depend on how tightly controlled your spammy links are.  If you're pretty sure you can get 98% of them with your disavow list, then I'd keep the domain.  If, on the other hand, you know that a bot ran posting comments on thousands and thousands of little blogs, it's very unlikely that you will be able to find most of those blogs and disavow them, and Google is just going to keep finding more and declining your reinclusion request.

FYI typically I've seen turnaround from a reinclusion request of about a week to 10 days.

If you do decide to go for a new domain, do NOT redirect, as you run a big risk of getting the penalty transferred.  Instead, contact the webmasters for all of the good, strong links, and ask for them to update their links to point to your new domain.  Yes, many of them will ignore you, but in terms of link-building, you're likely to have more success per hour of your time asking those sites who already link to your existing domain.

[artdivision]

Thanks for taking the time to reply Michael, much appreciated!