People buying links to their profiles on my site

[irvingw]

As we have a major Penguin update looming in the background, I am looking for expert advice on how to deal with professionals buying into link programs whether they are doing it deliberately or not. Our site provides detailed profile information on hundreds of 1000's of professionals and some professionals apparently believed that buying into link program will lift their profile in the SERPS.

About 10 professionals have paid shady link building companies to buy links to their profiles on our site. The biggest offender bought over 1,500 links to his profile. Aside from adding the known toxic links to our disavow file, what else can we do to avoid any link penalties?

I can think of three distinct options and would love to hear feedback especially based on actual experience.

Option 1. 404 the existing profile - "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith" and create a new URL "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith_1".

Option 2. Keep the existing URL and fully rely on the disavow file. Contact the professionals and kindly ask them to stop buying links and to contact their link building companies to remove the links.

Any other ideas?

[Dr-Pete]

I'd tend to agree - it's really tough to say without knowing more about the site, but a bit of bad behavior across hundreds of thousands of profiles shouldn't impact you that much. Of course, just having hundreds of thousands of indexed profile pages can have its own hazards, so it depends a lot on the site, authority, etc.

The other option would be to just NOINDEX any questionable profile pages - that should sever the offending links. Of course, it also means those pages won't be able to rank, which could irritate the people building the links to them, so I'm not sure how lightly you want to tread. If you 404 and change the URL, you're sort of doing the same thing - they'll still have to rebuild and won't be happy about it.

[generalzod]

Would it be out of the question to ban the members for violating your TOS and delete their profiles?

Aside from that, if your site is big and has many members etc, I dont think people building spammy links to your site will hurt your SEO. What does OSE or ahrefs say about your anchor text profile? Are these user campaigns having any affect?