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Since I've been a webmaster at several sites, some of them got hit by spammy links. Not going into why and how, the simple solution was always content for us! Getting a good article on why is acupuncture great, getting an article about real life help scenarios, you know, anything and everything an average reader would like to know about your service. If you provide a helpful article, it will get shared on other sites and blogs, social media and get the healthy link number up in a certain period of time. There are sites with 400-500 spammy domains pointing to them, but they aren't affected. Bear that in mind.

From what I know both will work. And from some info they both work just about the same time as Google still has to index those websites again. Will they do it and the link is not found or will they disavow it, that's just a matter of perspective. From a safety point of view the manual deletion is the 100% safe way they are removed, but disavow tool is the perfect action against those links if you don't wish to waste time to remove something you haven't created in the first place. 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!

Hello! That honestly depends on the level of paranoia you have and the need to remove them manually so they don't show up anywhere. From my experience it's best to disavow them, wait a few weeks for the algorithm to refresh and move on! And bear in mind, one solid, healthy and authoritative link will serve almost enough juice that dozens of low quality spam links will not be valued at all. This is the case with today's link building, you always have the issue of getting a 50-60 spammy links just through some low quality bookmarking website scraping content from other sites of the same nature. Thanks!

Wouldn't recommend it! Just simply 301 the .com to .net and you're done. What's the use of doing it all? I mean with that amount of traffic you shouldn't be worrying about such trivial things. And in my experience, difference between those two is simply with direct traffic. Which accounts for how much of the access numbers? Simply put, you would be wasting a lot of time and money for it. But that's just my opinion on the matter.

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!

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!

Sir, this is where I completely agree! I have a client who's been hit by what seems to be link spam. Some 100-150 domains pointing to their site from low quality websites with no use whatsoever. Client is completely honest, doesn't do optimization and/or link building and there's no way we are thinking anybody from our side went and created it. To other knowledge, it seems some of these sites are just bot scraping services that use content from other sites, but not important here. Here's the important part ...

After Penguin 2.0 rankings have dropped somewhat. But the issue at hand was never the 120-150 spammy links which we are pretty positive Google has devalued already. Issue at hand is that the client wasn't producing quality content, useful content or anything in between that will help their website and business grow. We are still debating on whether to use the disavow tool or not, but that's a whole different subject on it.

My point here is that thing happens, specially in a highly saturated niche like the one my client is in. On another example (from a guy I know who shares his wisdom) something similar happened to his client. No disavow tool used, no special link creating technique used, just honest, healthy and amazing content that proved useful to his client's needs later on.

They have dropped severely in rankings after what seemed to be bad link spam from a competitor and have been doing discounts, special packages, information on ordering such a service (they range from $500-1200 depending on nature and distance of it) and they got around 50-80 super healthy links (authority sites in the niche, some big websites, some huge blog networks promoted their post and such) where they regained their rankings, surpassed them and are now #2-5 on several highly competitive keywords.

Those extremely great (some PR6-8) links have severely influenced their link portfolio! They have managed to pull ahead thanks to quality content, useful and smart services, great promotions and one important aspect ... amazing social media campaigns as well. Where I sincerely believe in most cases the issue is never quantity, but quality!

Same thing with negative SEO which cannot happen with a highly useful and amazing website and service. Same thing with footer links. You cannot be held accountable if someone goes online and buys 2000-3000 low quality links to ruin your efforts. But I believe that even one, high page rank authority site with thousands of users can mean more than 100-1000 spammy links that usually get devalued right away.

Thank you for your reply! Just as I imagined, they don't pose any real issue since the healthy links will outweigh them in importance. I will inform the site owner that we should keep doing the marketing and promotional work as done so far, as Penguin did hit and rankings are almost all the same now. Thanks!

For the sake of this argument, I have a website where there were some 120-150 spammy links created. Basically I see a ton of low quality bookmarking sites who are somewhat scraping content of each other. Very few anchor text names and those are taken from authority sites in the niche as well, the others (some 80% of them) are direct domain name anchor text links to the site in question now. So, would any of you recommend adding all those links into the disavow tool if nothing is happening in terms of penalties or ranking changes now? I am having a lot of opposite opinions about this matter. Thanks!

Word is about Penguin 2.0 and that's the reason to post this question and start the discussion we are having. Rankings in top 10 keywords have dropped across the board. Meaning Google, Yahoo and Bing have done so as well. I am more keen to believe it's a website issue than simply blaming it all on Penguin 2.0 here. Or simply the campaign to remove spammy links is coming through for this website alone.

We are basing this on what research and real life example here? Has he been hit with a warning of any sorts? Was the website's rankings being dropped in any relation to this? Also, doing anything out of the ordinary when things are currently working perfectly is a straight path to problems in any aspect in life, but from what I know from personal experience so it is with optimization as well.

Here's a checklist I go through when these matters come in hand:

1. When did the links get indexed by Google?
2. How much time has passed?
3. Was the site hit by any of the recent algorithm updates?
4. Did my website drop severely in rankings?
5. Am I doing the best to keep healthy and authoritative links creation in check?

If you haven't been hit by anything, your rankings are there, your healthy link building is there, unique content being created and natural links pointing to the site itself, why would you waste time and money on something you clearly did not do, do not control and hasn't affected you yet? His example may be somewhat different, but basically fixing something that ain't broke is really not the go to way here.

If and when his website does get hit by a penalty, do something. Make the list of links, anchor texts, create a contact list for the administrators of that website, keep a disavow tool list in check, but use it when you need to do so. Thanks!

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!

Hello! I know this may sound a bit weird, but has anyone experienced any search engine rankings drop after Penguin on Bing and Yahoo as well? I am trying to locate the issue with one website I am doing optimization on and it has ranked lower on some keywords on all three search engines, directing me to suspect there's an issue with the site itself. Thanks!

Hello! It means that spammy link that just links to your site without anchor text and it's a nofollow links does not value the same as something with straight keyword name anchor text in the link itself. So page you have shown us here is probably devalued with Google it doesn't pose any real value or threat to your site, however you wanna put it. How are your anchor texts spread out through the link profile?

Hello! Honestly you shouldn't worry about any bad links created two years ago. If they were hurting your website, it would of been seen a year or so ago, not now. One simple aspect of driving more traffic (but not directly) would be social media profiles created specifically for that phrase and thus allowing a lot more people to visit your website. Talking offhand about what's the cause of your issues without the link profile introduction is really unprofessional and thus if you want a more straightforward answer, some insights on the number of links, link profile looks and such would be useful. 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.

My idea behind it was not to loose any time and effort about it. Anyone can go online and buy thousands of links from various sources for little or no relevant amount of money at all. Google simply devalues those links and allows us to work our best to create a healthy link profile, where we promote services, provide good content, research, helpful articles and such, thus garnering links from a various selection of sources. We had an issue with one website which was hit by a ton of spammy links from some bookmarking services. No action was taken. Seems a bit wrong to waste time and money on something you cannot control perfectly. After all, you can use the disavow tool if you wanna do something before anything happens, but I wouldn't recommend it.

What seems here is that your duplicate content might poise the problem. Have you used any SEO tools to remove archives, tags and such from being accessed by crawlers? From what I know search engines don't like sudden spikes in anything! Be that inbound links, outbound links, content pages or anything in between. But check the first idea I told you about, maybe it helps.

Tom, would you state that Google takes the spammy links into account and devalues website rankings which have good links with them as well, or is it simply Google removing those spammy link domains as any relevant source of link importance and thus making the websites loose rankings just for the simple fact these domains hold no real value with Google now? Thanks!

Simple answer (which you wont like) is that nobody has a good idea why it happens. I had a site where no links were created drop significantly in rankings. Why? Have no real idea. Content is good, your social media signals are good, wait a few days and check it out then.

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!

Hello! I have a website that has been hit with around 120-150 spammy bookmarking sites which I believe are just scraping content from one another or were added by someone that was hired earlier or maybe some other action, but that really doesn't matter. My question is whether I should be worried about that many domains linking to the site in question with anchor text that is "www.domainname.com" and linking to the domain itself?

I have done quite a few researches on this issue and the general conclusion is these don't help, but they don't hurt your rankings either. I wanted to hear from the SEOMoz community about it though.

My opinion is Google doesn't take them seriously and we shouldn't worry about them, try to take them off and we should simply work on our content, guest posts, produce our generally great deals on our services and move on. Thanks!