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Im assuming you dont have any existing penalties, you just dropped those links into the disavow to clean up the link profile right? If so, then you will notice a drop in ranking within 2 weeks usually (if the site benefited from those links) Building new links, content and doing outreach shouldnt be a problem to it. It will just do it's own thing.

Good response Paul.

would now looking at the DA and PA of the domain/page respectively, be equally effective in determining the quality of a site, to ascertain whether it is worth reaching out to...? -Yea it will be more effective. Hope this helps

The Pagerank of a page, no matter what page it is, will flow out of the page to the pages to which it is linked.  The amount of Pagerank that is passed to a specific page is determined the amount of pagerank the linking page has, the number of links on that page, and the subtraction of a certain percentage of Pagerank (because the algorithm determines that there will always be some lost). Take your first example: Let's say the homepage has 100 units of link juice (just work with me here).  And let's say the homepage has 16 links on it to 16 pages and the percentage of link juice lost off is 20% (I'm not aware they've ever told us exactly how much is lost).  After the 20% decrease, the homepage has 80 units of link juice to pass on to the linked pages.  Since there are 16 links, each page gets 5 units of link juice (80/16=5). So, in the case of your first example, where a site's homepage has a lot of links coming to it and the category and product pages don't have any, that may be alright for them.  If they have a good link structure, they may pass enough Pagerank through their internal links to the category and product pages to give them enough authority to out rank other similar product pages.  This actually works very well for sites because typically you want the homepage to rank for more general keywords which are more competitive and category and product pages to rank for more specific keywords which are less competitive.  So, the pages that have the most authority are competing for the most competitive keywords. In your second example, it works similarly, the blog pages each pass a certain amount of Pagerank to the homepage based on how many links each blog post gets (and how authoritative those links are) and how many links are on those blog post pages.  Each post may be passing only a small amount of Pagerank, but since the blog has a lot of blog posts all linking to the homepage, it starts to add up.  That builds up the Pagerank of the homepage, which can then be passed on the category and product pages.  You can also pass Pagerank directly to the product pages by linking to them in the blog posts. As to whether having a relevant keyword in the anchor text increases the amount of Pagerank passed in the link, no it doesn't.  It can, however, contribute to the linked page's link reputation.  The anchor text in the links to a page are one signal to the search engines of what that page is about and, thus, what keywords that page should rank for.  So, having relevant keywords in the anchor text, can help a page to rank better for specific keywords because it increases the page's reputation for that keyword.  This, however, I believe has been somewhat weakened lately with Google's updates.  Do to spam abuse, I think Google has lessened the signal of anchor text. I hope this to make it more clear for you. Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

Content has been my primary method of attack for a long time.  I have tried PPC and still do it occasionally.  The problem with PPC is that the competition is fierce.  So, I attack all possible keywords with substantive content - usually having more content than all of my competitors combined.  That earns me great organic positions for a majority of the long tail keywords. I place ads on those content pages that divert traffic to my sales pages.  After building up a site I get a significant part of my sales from traffic that landed on content pages.  I know how many visitors enter through those pages, their conversion rates and the average value of a sale, plus my profit margin.  That allows me to know the average value of an ad click.  I then compete those ads with adsense using Google's DFP ad server and am glad to take payment for a visitor instead of sending them to my store - because I know that the potential profit is sometimes higher.