My own experience, i was removing lots of bad links: directories backlinks with my "money" keywords" and i lost traffic, and did not gain any google recognition. so, not sure, what was better, trying to regain google rank or whatever left from the traffic i had before.
Re-develop your website with good quality contents, fallowing Google webmaster guidelines. No Over Optimization or Spam, Create few Quality backlinks and you will get your website back to top position in SERP....
our site http://hostingpost.com used to be ranked very high and got about 5000 to 10000 visitors per day but seen panda/penguin updates it is now on page 7 or 10. Seo experts recommended us to delete all contents altogether and making a new one. Chance your site is the same with repeats useless contents. there is no way out if you still have the same contents.
If backlinks could hurt your site rank, you could just set up a backlink service to ruin all of your competition. My guess is it`s your on page content, most likely over optimization. Try reducing your keyword density dramatically(once in the first paragraph and thats it).
well, your site is in real problem. you have 36k links from .ca site with "contact us 4 advertisement" anchor text. 40% of all links 31k links from .ca with anchor text "polls archive", etc, 44% of all links. and so on. you must have 1 link from 1 domain , brand anchor text, 3 words anchor text , 2 words anchor text consider spam diversifying are main key. many backlinks with many long tail anchor text to main and sub category. you are just in mess. get your self account with ahrefs dot com spend money to fix your issues. i did , i got out sand box with 4 reconciderations , it took 5 months. my rank only pick up 20% from bottom. did not re-gain my best levels. 2 months later, just 20% increase from bottom.
Already so many answers, Well in sadbox the best option is to make quality links and to improve the quality of the website.. You website will be back(not exact on same position as it was before) but some where.. If you have good quality links then you can have a good position either...
Live example, that after being in sandbox for 6 months, site E commerce Store recover from it but only regain 30% of the traffic. its very slow recovery and submit to disavow tool, cleaning a lot of backlinks, lots of them was not even contact webmasters. so, its a big pain to get in to sandbox. Advise, not to get in that situation when you are looking lots of business and very slowly recovery from it.