I received a message from Google WMT on July 23rd about unnatural links to my site. And my ecommerce site suffered a big drop on sept 29th about 70% drop in organic traffic. My it guys have discovered that our past seo companies placed ton of bad links to our site. we have contacted lots of these companies for 3 weeks after we lost our traffic to remove their links. Some of them did remove them i believe and most of them did not even reply back. We have learned about the disavow tool in 3 rd week in Oct after that we have compiled the links and submitted the file on Oct 22nd and submitted a reconsideration on Oct 23rd. We got a reply back on Nov 12th saying that
"Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes."
I did not participate in any link schemes or otherwise suggested practice here. So my question at this point is, is it possible that google' quality team did not see the file or did not take it in to consideration. How long would it take this tool to work? is there an example of this file where i can see how the format should be if any different than how we had it. my site is goldenageusa.com
Thank you