Intermediate-Advanced Technical Questions on Google Penguin Clean-up Strategy

Hello SEO Warriors!

I was hit with a REAL bad penalty in May 2013, and the date corresponds to Penguin #4. Never received a manual spam action for this, but the 50% drop in traffic was very apparent. Since then, I've had a slow reduction in traffic, to where I am today... which is almost baseline. Increases in traffic have not occurred regardless of efforts (positive helpful content creation, gaining natural links through sharing info, etc.).

In researching a little more, I see that my old SEO companies built my links with exact keyterm matches as the link text, many of them repeated over and over, verbatim, on different sites. I've heard two pieces of advice that I don't like 1) scrap the site, or 2) disavow ALL the links.

I would rather see if I can get the webmasters to change the link to something generic, just the url, or my brand name, before I do either of these. To scrap my site and start new will be near impossible because I'm in an extremely competitive niche, and my site has age (since 2007), so rather work with what I have.

A couple of questions, if I may:

1) This penguin update, #4, on May 22nd, was it ONLY because of the link text? Or was it also because of the link quality? None of the updates before it harmed me, and I believe those were because of the quality?

2) Could it be for links linking from my blog to my site? My blog (ex. www.mysite.com/blog), has close to 1,000 blog posts, and back in the days I would write these really long, keyword stuffed links leading to www.mysite.com. I've been in the process of cleaning these up, and shortening them, and changing them to more generic (click here's), but it is a LONG and painstaking process.

3) If I get webmasters to change text to just the url or brand name, that's better than disavowing, correct? As long as the link is from a quality source?

4) Is having SOME exact anchor text okay on these links? Is it just the abuse that's the problem? If so, how many should I leave? (like 5 max per keyword?) Or should I just change to the url, or disavow altogether, any and all links that have exact keyword matches?

5) I've downloaded my link profile from OSE and Majestic, and will do so from Ahrefs (I believe it is)? Does Webmaster Tools have any section that can help give me insights into the issue? If so, can you point me in the right direction?

6) Can I get partial credit, for some work done? For instance, say a major update, or crawl, happens, and I've only fixed/disavowed 25% percent of the links by then, is there a possibility that I get a small boost in traffic? Or am I in the doghouse till they are all fixed?

7) Say I clean/disavow everything up, will my improvement be seen in the next crawl? Or the next Penguin update? As there may be a substantial difference in time there?

Thanks guys, but the last thing I want to do is ditch my site... I will work hard on this, but need some guidance.

Much appreciated!


David


PS, I see AHREFS, has some information on anchor text... any rules of thumb as to percentages of use of a certain anchor text, to see if I'm abusing or not, before I start undertaking all of this? Thanks!