Source: http://moz.com/blog/most-important-link-penalty-removal-tool-your-mindset
Getting slapped with a Google penalty can definitely harm your business, but there are ways on how to recover and slowly regain the rankings and traffic that you lost.
Recover from a google penalty
1. Gathering link data
You may use tools like Ahrefs, Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO, and Open Site Explorer
2. Evaluating links
– Link from low quality directories should be removed as they violate Google’s guidelines. Look at your links and identify which came from the following:
- Article directories
- Forum comments
- Blog comments
- Countries where you don’t operate
- Link sharing schemes like Link Wheels
- Paid links
– Also identify links using rich anchor text or money keywords as these looks unnatural.
3. Requesting for link removal
– If you have been slapped with a Penguin penalty, link removal will not be the best solution.
– Google recognizes and rewards efforts of cleaning up the bad links so contact the webmasters of the offending websites and request for their removal.
– Disavow any links that didn’t get removed manually. Instead of disavowing the individual links, proceed to disavow the entire domain.