We recently made a foolish mistake on our web site regarding links. We innocently put a bunch of links on our site from various forums from accross the web. These links link back to our web site.

These links we place on our web site were from forums where members who posted messages about our site and their positive experience with our web site and our service to them.

It was just done as a way of letting our customers know the quality of service we provide. I'm sure Google wouldn't have penalized us if we had done it over a longer time frame.

Unfortunately, our mistake was that we added too many links too fast. I believe google saw all these new links to us so quickly that it considered it "spammy".

I can see that most of the forum postings have a PR of 0, because they are deep pages, so i figure when the Googlebot visited our site and saw all of these brand new links coming back to us, it figured we had done something black hat.

Our rankings have gone down significantly in the week or two since this occured. We have since removed those links in hopes that our ranks will return to their previous position.

My question is, will our rankings eventually revert back to the old positions after time, or is this penalty more permanent in nature?