How about i disavow all links and start seo from the begining?
It wont work, what i suggest you do is In
1:WMT down load latests links
2:download links in either Ahrefs or Majestic SEO
3:combine links in a excel sheet and remove duplicates
4:upload links to a link checker and see if links are dead (showing 404, 500 error or any error at all) copy those links and add to a spreadsheet and make as cleared
5:check all links for no follow attribute
6:The rest of the links you can scan over quickly and see if there are any truly good links (there may be a few)
7: the rest you disavow
8:Submit the spreadsheet with all the links , 404, 500 not reachable links and say you have removed them, the no follows leave as you should not be punished for these and the disavow links list and state you tried to remove Blah Blah Blah
9:hope fully you have done enough to get whatever penalty removed once removed 301 the site to a new domain. rankings should be back a lot quicker than if you were to wait for the site to rank after penalty removed or by starting a brand new domain
If you 301 before you cleaned the site the penalty will pass through
disavow from domain level domain:badsite.com
I have now recovered 5 of my sites 1 to go and all have returned to previous levels or close to it as possible
I use Link research tools so made my life a bit easier and i wont lie it does take time, but you have to be ruthless with the links,
Google pointed out to me a page they deemed spam, which was a PR4 DA/PA 55/62 site which is quite authoritative, but looking at that link it had a money keyword and the brand so its being very picky.
I am going away next week, if you have a serious site (i mean your money site) a site worth saving PM me the URL along with a email and ill run through link detox and send you the report, which with a bit of filtering will show all bad domains, expired domains, pr, duplicate IP pretty much everything you could need and send back to you, however if its a affiliate site then i wont waste mine or yours
The reason i offer this is because i was hit on my money site and it hurt real bad, to the point i nearly lost a business and my livelihood