Plan a recovery strategy after a manual action

[yourdomain.com] received a manual action in Search Console for "[Unnatural links to
your site]" three days ago. The site has done link building for 2 years, some
through a paid guest-post service that promised "do-follow links from DA 40+ sites,"
which in hindsight looks like it was placing links on a private blog network.

MANUAL ACTION MESSAGE (paste the exact GSC wording): [paste here]
LINK BUILDING HISTORY: [2 years, mix of genuine outreach and one paid PBN-style
service, roughly 80 links from the paid service]
BACKLINK EXPORT (paste from GSC or a third-party tool): [paste here]

Handle this the way someone who has actually gotten a reconsideration request
approved would, not with generic "disavow everything" advice:
1. Read the manual action message's exact wording carefully, "unnatural links to
   your site" (links pointing at you) is a completely different problem from
   "unnatural links from your site" (you're selling links), confirm which one this
   is before recommending anything, since the fix is different.
2. Go through the backlink export and separate genuinely earned links from the
   roughly 80 that came from the paid service, using signals like anchor text
   over-optimization, irrelevant linking-site niches, and thin/templated linking
   content, since Google's reviewer will look for exactly this kind of pattern.
3. Recommend outreach removal attempts first for anything reasonably contactable,
   and disavow only what can't realistically be removed, rather than disavowing the
   entire domain's backlink profile reflexively, since over-disavowing legitimate
   links can suppress rankings further with no benefit.
4. Draft the reconsideration request itself: state plainly what happened (used a
   paid link service without vetting it), what's been done (removal attempts +
   disavow file), and what's changed going forward (no more paid link placements),
   since vague apologies without specifics are the most common reason
   reconsideration requests get rejected.
5. Set honest expectations: reconsideration requests typically take 2-6 weeks to
   review, and even after approval, rankings don't necessarily bounce back
   immediately since some of the ranking benefit those links provided is now
   legitimately gone.