Penguin - Start afresh?

I would say because the penguin slap/penalty is attached to your domain, not the actual links or domains pointing to your site, so even if you removed all the links then you will still likely be in the doldrums, google purposely doesn't make it easy to get out of a penalty, if the linkdisavow tool worked like that, there would be no risk in doing seo, cause if you got a slap then you could simply disavow all the links then bam your back ranking, unfortunately it doesn't work like that, and google even said themselves "they'll only disavow what they want to, not everything you submit", plus I think disavowing links is kinda selling out to google, plus you're admitting engaging in link building, especially if you disavow more than once. Imo, once a domain is penalized it's permanently tainted, sort of like somebody with a criminal conviction, sure they may be out of jail but they've still got that stain on their record...

I haven't seen any good news anywhere about the link disavow tool working. What I do know is that getting a new "brandable" domain and doing a page for page 301 redirect from the penalised site to the new site does work. [Hint: do not attach the new site to any Google webmaster tools account and register the new domain with very different name and address details just to be safe]

In my experience it took about 3 weeks to recover the rankings. The good thing is if it doesn't work out all you have spent is a bit of money on a new domain name and an hour or so of work. And you can turn it off whenever you like.

When you're spamming Google with low-quality backlinks - which you are when you get demoted by Penguin - you should be prepared to move on from a domain.

You knew the risk. So why cry when the hammer falls? The 'disavow tool' was built for dreamers who wish they could whine their way out of penalties. The world doesn't work that way - and neither does Google.

Starting over is the only way to ensure the penalty quits mattering.

I would agree to start fresh. I've been dealing with a penalty since last October. I redirected a penalized domain and it took two months for the new domain to get ranked (probably the same time to rank a site anyways). The penalty must have expired because the site started ranking only to get slapped again a month later.

Google said they want to see efforts of removing the links so I told them I removed the redirect and the new domain is clean. Seems to easy because I feel they want you to put some work into it to have the penalty lifted.

If this doesn't work I'm putting the redirect back in place and build ten times the amount of spammy links because bing and yahoo don't mind. So my strategy going forward will be a emd with a ton of links to rank on bing and yahoo and a really clean site to rank on google.

At least in my niche it is the big names and site that have a lot of content that make it to the top.

Personally I would not start over. I was hit by Penguin in April 2012. I was on page 1&2 for 80% of my keywords and then BOOM....nothing past the top 100...I thought about starting over but when I realized that for one it was not really about my links BUT about my anchor text I got into overdrive around August and for the first few months I did 1 keyword and 4 generics, so if I was doing a link build on 2 keywords I would also include 8 generics (mixed in with my url and brand name as awell)

Come to today I am back and better then before. It was not overnight by any means BUT I did get back to where I was and some keywords are doing even better. So depending on what your site was I would say dig deep and climb your way out. It can be done!

I would spam diverse anchors. I think most of penguin is anchor text.

Just my opinion, never been effected. Just from correlation studies, that seems like the way out.

it was panda updates Google penguin update didn't happen yet, last update was May 2012 the coming update will be the big one Google will specifically targets large link network...