Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Give it a few days and see how the SERPs settle.Its probably Google doing a shuffle as I have seen extremely legitimate white-hat sites with almost zero links get hit really hard.

Its strange because all of my newer domains (less than 3 months) were not hit while the older ones were. Some have recovered while others have not. Whats worse, some super spammy websites have not budged at all! And some top ranked sites now have 5 backlinks or they are super spammy.

So just sit tight a week, and see what happens. Hope for the best.

You are suppose to reach out and have the links removed as disavow is suppose to be used as a last resort tool.

Penguin 2.1 is pretty strange, some of my clients sites got hit, others saw a rise. Whats weirder is that the larger companies (amazon, yelp, yellowpages etc) are dominating the first page. Theres a few local keywords where 8 out of the 10 rankings is yelp!

Anyhow, I think you should let the website sit a week or so and let the dust settle before resorting to disavow. I think Google is just shuffling.

There was an update today and it was pretty ugly. If your drop was in the last 24-48 hours, that might have been the culprit.

Did you use C-class IPs on the blogs? Or were they hosted on different hosts? Did you interlink the blogs?

Theres some silly rankings going on, sites with 1 backlink ranking for 25k monthly searched keyword.

Its not about google being "smart enough." Its the fact that your old domain carries a penalty and if you 301 it, the penalty will be passed on.

I have tested this in the past and the penalty ALWAYS gets passed on to the new domain.

As a pre-caution, either test it on another domain or just forget about it and start fresh.

If the previous domain was penalized and its still penalized, then it is a good idea to not re-direct. The penalty will carry over.

You can simply grab a fresh domain, re-direct the domain in question and see the results. If its positivie, then go ahead and redirect to your new site.