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Hi Tom, Thanks for the response. We received the manual penalty at the same time Penguin 2.0 was released (Some point around May 22nd) We've got some really impressive content marketing pieces in place for the next few months so hopefully the value we'll gain through that will replace the links that were removed Thanks again

We're seeing some mixed messages from Google in this regard. They have suggested recently that links do have to be re-crawled to be disavowed. For an algorithmic penalty, that should be enough. For a manual penalty, even if the links are disavowed and re-crawled, Google still may require a reconsideration request. So, it can be a bit tricky. For reconsideration, someone is looking at the request, so we assume they take the disavow into account and try to adjust for that, but it may depend on the person and the situation. It's important that you thoroughly document what you've done in the reconsideration request. Don't just disavow a ton of stuff and then say "Hey, can we get back in?" They won't take that seriously, in most cases.

These guys are right. I use to manage a few sites with servers located in Asia and Europe and the rankings were never affected by the location of the server. So just some hands on experience for you.