Hey guys... my main site got slaughtered by penguin, and it was basically because a couple of times I paid a VA to create some back links for me. I could understand a slight hit, but they really buried me. I went from the first page to practically extinct.

The silver lining in all of this is that my VA kept a log of all the links she created so I can actually go and remove all of them. There are probably about 100 - 200 of these. It will probably take me an entire day to do this.

My questions is, since I have the ability to remove them... should I spend a precious day doing this? I've read many posts and a lot of you seem to think it will only be a waste of time.

The Ironic thing is that I do have a lot of great originally content on my site. I'm actually the best author in my micro-niche... I help my readers out and I get great feedback. I was just trying to get a little edge and rank for various keywords. Many of my links were natural but now my site is totally gone. Now one of my competitors that copies a lot of my stuff is ranking in number 1 and I'm no where to be found! WTF!

So what do you guys think? Is it worth the effort? Or should I just start over with a new website? Also... my author name is associated with my website... I don't know if my name has been tarnished as well, so that if I create a website with my Pen Name it will also be hard to rank since that name has been tarnished?

Finally, last question. If I do remove the back links, how do I submit all of the pages they were on so they get indexed quickly and google brings my site back?

Anything else I can do?

Thanks!