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I have been going through potentially harmful backlinks using Moz's Open Site Explorer spam rankings and contacting site owners to request removal.  Some of these links do not have contact information.  For these, I have considered using the Google Disavow tool, but I see warnings all over the internet to only use it if absolutely necessary.  My idea is to only use it if I actually receive a penalty.  My problem is I am not sure if we ever have received a penalty or what it would even look like.  In short, how do you know if you've received a Google Algorithmic penalty?

I am managing my company's spammy backlinks using Open Site Explorer.  Our company owns a few URLs that are related to our company or are iterations of our main URL.  All of these additional URLs have 301 redirects to our main domain.  Open Site Explorer has identified one of these URLs as having a spam score of 8 indicating a 56% chance of Google crawler penalization.  Obviously, this is a red flag.  Instead of being redirected to our main domain upon visiting the URL, I was directed to what seems to be an automatically generated, generic webpage with links that seem to have been generated by keywords from our main domain.  I have seen this type of webpage before when incorrectly typing in URLs from other pages.  They tend to look the same.  They have a black background with the URL written in grey at the top and a rectangular related links bar.  Is anyone familiar with my problem and could you offer any advice? Thanks, Ben

I am trying to manage my backlinks by removing ones with high spam links, but I am having trouble drawling the line between helpful/harmful links.  One link, for instance, has a span ranking of 7 indicating a 30% chance of penalization from Google crawlers.  This same link, however, also boasts a domain authority of 67 which indicates it is also potentially helpful to my own Google crawler success. My question is, which of these scores (spam rank and domain authority) trumps the other?  Should I try to get the site owner to remove it?  Am I even thinking about this issue correctly?  If so, how would you suggest I draw the line in the future? Ben

I used the organic spam backlink removal tactic of emailing owners of sites of spam rank 7 or higher on my page.  It has been weeks since many of the harmful links were removed, yet they remain listed on my Open site Explorer page.  My fear is that somehow simply getting these links removed doesn't exempt me from the potential to be penalized by Google crawlers.  Does it take longer than a few weeks for these links to disappear from the Open Site Explorer, or is there something else I need to be doing? Any and all advice appreciated. Ben