After getting with what looks to be a penalty, what should I do next?

Around 12/22, the guy we have working on our companies SEO decided to test out a new linklist (full of Web 2.0's, Blogs comments, etc) and blast backlinks directly to my money site (no 2nd, or 3rd tier links.) Wasn't seeing any movement until about the 29th, in which we saw a huge drop on one of our main keywords (from 2nd, to 8th), which stayed 8 until yesterday when it dropped to 9th.

So I'm pretty sure we received a penalty on the site, but I was wondering what the best course of action would be to a site that's been recently penalized? I also went and disavowed all of the links in hopes that the bad neighborhood links are discredited... though I've heard this can take weeks.

Is it a bad idea to start building links again manually, or should I have him settle down until I see the rank reverts back to its' original position (if it ever does)?

Thanks ahead of time!!!

Anybody able to help me out with this? :[

Ouch. Check your anchor text diversity. If your SERP has settled, slowly drip some diversified, quality backlinks with highly diversified anchors. Look as natural as possible... big G is watching you now... :redindian

smirker said:

Ouch. Check your anchor text diversity. If your SERP has settled, slowly drip some diversified, quality backlinks with highly diversified anchors. Look as natural as possible... big G is watching you now... :redindian

Click to expand...

Bah. Still really frustrating.

Was disavowing the links the right first step?

People seem to have differing opinions on the disavow tool so it is hard to say. You have done it now so I wouldn't worry about it. Just carry on with the manual link building.

That's not a penalty. If you had gotten a penalty then your site would be gone from the first page.