Cleaning Up Bad 301 External Links From Old Site

[alrockn]

A relatively new site I'm working on has been hit really hard by Panda, due to over optimization of 301 external links which include exact keyword phrases, from an old site.  Prior to the Panda update, all of these 301 redirects worked like a charm, but now all of these 301's from the old url are killing the new site, because all the hyper-text links include exact keyword matches.  A couple weeks ago, I took the old site completely down, and removed the htaccess file, removing the 301's and in effect breaking all of these bad links.  Consequently, if one were to type this old url, you'd be directed to the domain registrar, and not redirected to the new site.  My hope is to eliminate most of the bad links, that are mostly on spammy sites, that aren't worth linking to.  My thought is these links would eventually disappear from G.

My concern is that this might not work, because G won't re-index these links, because once they're indexed by G, they'll be there forever.  My fear is causing me to conclude I should hedge my bets, and just disavow these sites using the disavow tool in WMT.  IMO, the disavow tool is an action of last resort, because I don't want to call attention to myself, since this site doesn't have a manual penalty inflected on it.  Any opinions or advise would be greatly appreciated.

[JaneCopland]

Closing this particular thread as it's a duplicate - answers going up on the other thread.

[alrockn]

Yes, 301...Thank You!  I'm trying to address bad 301 links being sent from the old url, to the new url.

[KeriMorgret]

401 is unauthorized. Do you mean a 301 redirect? If not, could you expand a little bit so we can better understand the situation? Thanks!