The Tale of two websites hit by Penguin 2.0

[Garya]

Two of my sites where hit in the last update.

1. Home page and some inner pages where demoted for main keywords back to page 9.

Today they came back to where they where before the update.

I removed many bad links pointing to those pages cleaned up the link profile and submitted domains to the disavow tool on google.

I also reduced the content on those pages down from 800 words to 300.

Site 2

2. Home page and some inner pages where demoted for main keywords back to page 100+.

Did the same as above but no improvement. I also sent a reconsideration request, which google responded to and said no manual penalty was given and suggest I keep removing links.

[Robert Charlton]

Garya - Thanks for the report.

#1... Today they came back to where they where before the update.

Congratulations on this one... You must have done something right.

#2... suggest I keep removing links.

That's interesting that they sent you a specific recommendation. I haven't dealt with any Penguin penalties personally, but as I've read about them here, this is the first I remember where they're guiding you toward the specific problem.

Remove more links.

I'd take a look at these two references that might help you do this....

Best practices for using the Google disavow tool, confirmed
Feb 3, 2013
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4542078.htm [webmasterworld.com]

"Be aware of the site-wide disavow possibility, it will make your life easier".

It's elsewhere been quoted that Matt Cutts has suggested using a machete.

Also, take a look at what Matt says at about 3:15 in this video, which I'm semi-quoting below...

What are common mistakes you see from people using the "disavow links" tool?
Matt Cutts - GoogleWebmasterHelp·- Jun 10, 2013
trt 4:21
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CX5K741AlWg [youtube.com]

The other thing that we see is sometimes people think that disavow is the be all end all, the panacea that's going to cure all their ills. ...If you've been doing some bad SEO and you're trying to cure it, in an ideal world you would actually clean up as many links as you can off the actual web. That's just a really helpful way for us to see, when you're doing a reconsideration request, that you're putting in the effort to try to make sure that things have been corrected and cleaned up and are not going to happen again.

Good luck.