Need advice about manual penalty that is affecting all the site for unnatural links pointing to the site

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Louise Li: A client I have just started working has received a manual penalty affecting all the site for unnatural links pointing to the site. This site is a well established brand and had number one rankings for all target terms and now they appear on page 4 even for brand terms.
  
  The message states there may have been links purchased or participation in link schemes but this is not the case at least for the last 2 years.
  
  The most recent link building approach has been focused around guest blogging and unlinked brand mentions. However looking back at historical links there are some low quality directories which were built in 2011.
  
  So my questions are as follows:
  Could these old links be causing this penalty?
  Would the guest blogging be causing this message?
  How quickly after getting these poor quality links removed can you submit a disavow request?
  Any other tips on a swift fix of this issue as traffic is way down?
  
  Thanks!
• 
  exidon - EXPERTOS WEB: Where exactly did that messages appear? Google Webmaster-Tools has a section for disavow, there you can tell Google not to consider those links., if something appears.
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  Louise Li: The message appeared in google webmaster tools saying a manual penalty has been applied. 
• 
  Tony McCreath: If those old links are still there and link to an existing page then they can still hurt you. ;
  
  Matt Cutts just made a dig at Guest Blogging for links. If your articles are low quality then they may also hurt you.
  
  Document all your efforts in getting those links removed. You will need to submit that when asking for a reconsideration.
  
  You don't need to disavow links that you have removed. Disavow the ones you failed at and document all attempts at trying to get them removed. ;
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  Kirk Fletcher: Google will never tell you this but disavow first then go about requesting deletion, even if you only manage to get 1 in every 100 deleted Google will be happy, this method always works wonders for clients that have come to us with penalties and we have always managed to get full rankings back within 2-3 weeks
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  Jelani Burton: I agree with what +Tony McCreath ;said. If it's a manual action, you may see some initial ranking recovery after you submit your disavow file and the algorithm updates but you also have to send in your reconsideration request to remove the manual action penalty. ;
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  Jelani Burton: +Kirk Fletcher ;Why do you suggest sending in the disavow before attempting to remove the links?  ;Is this just for extra measure.  ;It makes sense from this point jw if you had another reason behind this strategy.
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  Louise Li: Thanks for your comments I will be submitting a disavow request file and performing link removal as a priority. 
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  SeoWix: don't submit a disavow unless you manually try to remove some links. google want to see how serious you are in your effort. secondly if the above site is related to product selling then it is obvious to say, there is an evident on most of the product related keywords are not ranking anymore for such websites. it seem google is manually shuffling the KWs and ranking to some major brands for a while.
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  Ashish Ahuja: If it's a manual penalty just disavow links that you think are bad and file reconsideration request if links are still left that are bad then Google generally comes back saying that links sill violate Google tos and sometimes give examples of links too. If the give guest posts as examples then disavow then too. However it's difficult to see ranking come back again fast and in many cases never come back fully unless you are wpmu and get that kind of media attention