How to get rid of black hat links?

[StrategicEdgePartners]

I have recently discovered that one of my clients has either been sabotaged or has done this himself.  In the case that he didn't do anything, how do you go about getting rid of bad links? There is now over a 1000 bad links linked to his site, do I report them as spam or what is the best way to fix this?

[Carson-Ward]

Have you received a warning? Seen a drop in traffic/rankings? If so, then your best hope is to have them taken down - ideally by the person who built them. If that's not possible, get a spreadsheet together and list the actions you took on each crappy link. It's extremely tedious, but you can then link to the GDoc in your re inclusion request and show which ones were removed and which ones you tried to remove.

[jeffreytrull1]

Have you been penalized yet? If not, you're probably not in as bad a situation as Richard is describing. Unfortunately there aren't easy ways to get rid of these links, as Richard also states.

You can submit a spam report using Google Webmaster Tools. It might not really help, but it's one of the only options.

Here's a great post from Rand about this spam situation: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-if-my-competitors-point-spammy-links-to-my-site

[rdreich49]

You basically have to contact the websites from whence the links originate and ask them to remove the links, which can be an arduous process.

We were penalized for links one of our vendors got for us, so we are now going through the process of getting the offending links removed.  We are working with Virante, who is an SEOMoz recommended vendor and they are doing a great job.  Hopefully, as a result of their work, we will get our penalty lifted soon.