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I totally agree with XNUMERIK.  I had I site I took over after a "black hat" SEO was working on it and we dropped from #8 in Google to #212 after all my corrects.  We're number #1 now for that same keyword within 3 months. There is no "Data" to back up what I'm about to say, but it has worked nearly 100% of the time for me. Here is what I think happens: I corrected the technical stuff first (on-page) (site structure, internal linking and things like that) The drop occurred when Google Crawled my site before I had a chance clean up all the backlinks, 301s coming into the site. So, naturally I dropped because I basically blew my page authority. Once I had a good fix on all the off-page corrections to match the on-page stuff, I fetched as Google (in Google's Webmaster Tools) and submitted all linked pages. (I only recommend doing this when you've had major changes like you've done) It usually takes 4 to 5 crawls and I'm right back up where I was and usually higher then before. It doesn't take much longer with new links to the pages to rank it faster, especially if there is quality on-page SEO done.