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The answer really depends on what type of penalty you have, but in most cases, your whole site will be affected and the new content will likely struggle.  There are some cases where only a certain part of a website or even certain keywords are affected by a penalty and new content could still thrive, but that's not as common. Still, if you can add good fresh content then I would continue to do so!  This can be a sign of good faith to Google that you are actively working on improving your website.  You can even link to this content in your reconsideration request to show Google that you are doing all you can to make your website as helpful to users as possible.

Hi John, As the others have said, there are issues with all three types of links. Number 1 is obvious. Number 2 comes from a site that appears to blog about absolutely anything, as long as they're paid to do so. The site has posts about buying a car in Philadelphia, passport photos, saving money on gas, business protection... and piano lessons. It's pretty obviously a source of income for the blog owner, with these posts placed in between personal updates. Number three is from a piano website, but they even list "reciprocal links", which was an outdated link building technique in 2006 I would say that Google is well within its own guidelines to suggest that these links are bad.

I ignore these links when I'm doing a backlink audit.  If you've got a penalty, I would look elsewhere for culprits.  There's no harm in disavowing mrwhatis, but my guess is that Google knows that these are not self made links and just ignores them too.

Hi Marie,  Thanks for the input. I always hate trying to short answer something like this...cause I know someone's going to fill it in. You make good points. I still think given he has around 6500, if half of those are sitewide, it isn't to his benefit. What do you think? (I know you do a lot with penalty removal.)  He has gotten a partial penalty. Best to you, Robert

Hi John & Matt, Matt did a great job of giving you the links to how to use the tools. I thought one thing that might be helpful if it's your first week is running a crawl test it comes back a lot faster than running a campaign it just hit me that it might be of use to you here's the link  you simply place your domain into The box and it will email you the crawl test showing any errors with the website very useful tool for quite a few things. I love crawl test that Matt recommended it's a very good thing to start off with https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test I think any as he should have one additional tool in their toolbelt and it's free this is a great tool that spoken about quite a bit by Moz & I added a guide that is very helpful just something I thought would be helpful to anyone conducting seo I use it with screaming frog SEO spider http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ Free for the base 500 pages & http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide I think it's a real help with the use of the Moz tools (they are the best) this just adds to it. All the best, Thomas