Can you recover from "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" if you remove them or have they already been discounted?

[Beastrip]

If Google has already discounted the value of the links and my rankings dropped because in the past these links passed value and now they don't.  Is there any reason to remove them?  If I do remove them, is there a chance of "recovery" or should I just move forward with my 8 month old blogging/content marketing campaign.

[Carson-Ward]

Links that have been discounted do indeed factor into penalties. In fact, they're probably the links you want to remove FIRST because these are sites/pages that Google has already flagged. You should absolutely remove them, especially if you're under penalty of some sort.

Removing links is indeed a bit of a two-edged sword in that you often cut out some spam links that Google doesn't (yet) know about. That said, leaving the links in place is the poorer option in my view, as it prevents you from moving forward with a long-term strategy.

If all of your links are manipulative, it might be better just to start a new site rather than cleaning up to return to 0.

[Beastrip]

Again this issue has come up.  Anyone with any insight into this:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-action-not-17366.html?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonv6TOZKXonjHpfsX57%2B0lW6GzlMI%2F0ER3fOvrPUfGjI4FTMZhI%2BSLDwEYGJlv6SgFTbLCMbpx37gNXxU%3D

[OlegKorneitchouk]

If he has little-to-no natural, high authority links, changing to a new domain may be a better move.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Once again, it all comes down to "do you have real, natural, high quality links pointing to your site?" If you only have a couple, it may be easier to move domains and contact those link owners to point to new url. If you have many good links that would improve rankings, it may be easier to remove/disavow the bad links instead of getting all those links changed to point to new location.

[youngmaster]

Is it a bad idea for him to move the content to a new domain and be more careful about the links he acquires?

[Beastrip]

Thank you for the response.  However, it's not what I'm looking for.  I agree with the process my have mentioned for having penalty removed.  However, I'm asking about this specific penalty:

Unnatural Links - Partial Match - affecting some links.

If Google has already discounted these links and my rankings dropped as a result.  Is there any benefit to hiring a company for $1,000 to identify which links need to go and than pay $ per link to have them removed.  Finally putting the rest in a disavow file and sending it into Google.

Say they do remove the "penalty" would it do any good.  Did they discount the links AND hit my site with a penalty or did they just discount the links rendering having the "penalty" removed pointless.

[Davenport-Tractor]

Hi Beastrip,

In our opinion it wont make much difference for quit a while, however a ship shape website is what we should all strive for, and what Google likes most. If you were to put the hours of labor into correcting this issue the return on investment will disappoint you. So you should never let the problem get that bad, where you are being penalized in the first place. A clean ship will be handsomely rewarded, one that is in disrepair and neglected will not reach the same results, and will struggle to regain what it could have had if well maintained.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

You should attempt to remove them and add them to disavow list. Then in the RR, mention what you've done to fix the penalty.

If your rankings are based mostly on the manipulated links, your rankings will drop hard (which is most often the case). Once the penalty is removed though, start working on obtaining natural links so you can return to ranking. If the page/domain has no natural links, it may be easier to just start fresh.