Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Honestly this is an issue we all come across. My biggest concert was always these bookmarking websites scraping content, so you end up with 50-60 domains with bookmarking services serving exact same content, linking to your site with thousands of links that hold no real value.

From what I see both sites have the same way of doing things with a ton of articles with direct name anchor texts in the title. Do you really need it? Does it help your community in any way with regards to your website performing better? Will you attract any new readers from those sites?

Are you removing manually (eg. asking owner to remove them from the sites) or are you using the disavow tool to handle it? Thanks!

Please explore the links your hired help created for you. If it's too spammy, too many direct name anchor text or any other issue that isn't with Google's guidelines, then you have a problem. There are reputable experts on the forums here and thus the general rule is to hire someone who knows what's he doing and not promising results in a two months time. Bear in mind, some of my websites saw improvements you are talking about after two-three years of hard work, but that also meant their rankings are still there after each and every algorithm change.

Hello! It isn't a clear cut answer on it. For example, Penguin 2.0 hit a day ago. Some of the sites I managed saw decreased rankings, while some shown increased. Some of them were hit by what it seems is spammy links created for them, but some have not. I am really into believing Google simply ignores these spammy links as they are not real, they do not poise any real threat, show no real relevance and that's it!

Don't really agree with the answers posted here. A lot of people need some incentive to do an action. Maybe paraphrasing it a better, including "if" and "then do" terms in the text there will help a lot. So for example: "If you love the help you got from our website, make sure to tell your friends" will help a lot. Many people simply need to have the idea planted in their minds to do an action like that. Thanks!

Well first ask yourself this question: Are the links leftover after disavow tool was put to use quality ones? I mean, people always say their disavow tool hadn't worked and they haven't fully recovered. It is almost always the issue of the leftover links not posing any relevance to move you up in rankings. Nothing more.

Honestly I wouldn't scrape that site by any means. Your PageRank 3 is still good, means you do have some good links coming to your site and doing rash decisions just a short time have passed after a major algorithm change is never a good thing to do. This means your rankings may improve later on when all things settle down.

But the biggest question still stands. Are you having a good amount of high-quality and healthy links, natural links, pointing to various aspects of your website? Or are you now leftover with just a few good links when you disavowed all the bad ones? Thanks!

My idea is always do one thirds of everything - one third of time to contact spammy website owners to remove them, one third to have a fresh list of disavowed links and one third of building quality, healthy and great links through user help, great content, excellent services and such. Third part is the most important! I've seen from some cases on the web where websites had 300-400 spammy link domains pointing to them, algorithm penalty, rankings dropped, website owners and webmasters taking a complete turn in content creation, service creation, where the sites recovered and ranked on top pages for several keywords later on.

My thoughts are always make a website for human beings and provide a useful product, service, article, idea or whatnot. It will then help a great deal to make a website which garners tons of healthy and natural links since people find your site helpful and amazing. Nothing else is needed.

A link portfolio of a few hundred spammy links is what most sites come with these days. Unfortunately how ever Google and a ton of experts say negative link building is not that common, it really does get around in some highly competitive niches. Google has released the disavow tool just for that and it should definitely be used if you experience problems.

But bear in mind, Google devalues some spammy links with their ongoing daily procedures. When a website has 10-20 healthy links and 100-200 spammy ones which get devalued, rankings drop. Not just because there's a penalty, but because there simply aren't that much high quality links to start with.

Hope it clears it up somewhat. Thanks!