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I have some clients that recently got hit by "Penguin" they have several less than desireable backlinks that could be the issue?  Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed?  What are the odds that a webmaster on these spammy sites are going to remove them, and is it worth the time and effort?

My guess is that you got hit by the penguin update.  What kind of linkbuilding have you been doing?  Also it would be nice to see the site and no what keywords you were targeting.

Wow great info Ryan.  Is there a way to know for sure that a website has been penalized by Google and if this process needs to be started?

Well yeah you've got to build some high quality relevant links.  Your site is not just going to rank from on page optimization unless it is a very uncompetitive niche.  Which Dentists is probably going to take some linkbuilding.

Yeah this all came right around "Penguin" so I'm fairly certain it's related.  They do have a lot of exact anchor text too, but for a wide variety of terms.  They were also using blog networks, and have spammy links, so it's really hard to pinpoint which of these or if all of them are the problem.

At any rate should this be my process?

1. Resubmit to Google
2. See if they answer back and with what
3. If no answer proceed with removal
4. Get links from webmaster tools
5. Parse out Root linking Domains
6. Run through Netpeak Checker (awesome tool if you haven't used it) finds PR, SEOmoz stats, Google index, status code, etc.
7. First remove all PR 0 and live pages
8. Resubmit to Google
9. Second remove all deindexed PR 0
10. Resubmit to Google
11. Get other link source data (Majestic SEO, Opensite Explorer)
12. Remove PR 0 links
13. Resubmit to Google

Hopefully that will do it.  What do you think of this process?  Oh and Thank you very much for your help You're awesome.