've just made a discovery that may be a big factor in my problem. Last January I bought a few domains that were in my sector that had some backlinks. I then forwarded them to my domain. I never really investigated them at all. Now I checked one of them via ahrefs and it appears it was being used for all types of spam. All the keyword anchors are classic spam text. What I did was forward a black hole of a site to my own. I bet google penalized my for it. Last month I dropped the forwards and deleted the domains from my account. My question is, does anyone have experience with this. Will google forgive me and generally how fast? thanks!
