Last week I received an unnatural link warning from Google.  Sad times.

I followed the guidelines and reviewed all my inbound links for the last 3 months.  All 5000 of them!  Along with several genuine ones from trusted sites like BBC, Guardian and Telegraph there was a load of spam.  About 2800 of them were junk.  As we don't employ any SEO agency and don't buy links (we don't even buy adwords!) I know that all of this spam is generated by spam bots and site scrapers copying our content.

As the bad links have not been created by us and there are 2800 of them I cannot hope to get them removed.  There are no 'contact us' pages on these Russian spam directories and Indian scraper sites.  And as for the 'adult book marking website' who have linked to us over 1000 times, well I couldn't even contact that site in company time if I wanted to!  As a result i did my manual review all day, made a list of 2800 bad links and disavowed them.

I followed this up with a reconsideration request to tell Google what I'd done but a week later this has been rejected "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines."  As these links are beyond my control and I've tried to disavow them is there anything more to be done?

Cheers

Steve

I would agree noindex is not as good as removing the content but it still can work as long as there are no links or sitemaps that lead Google back to the low quality content.

I worked on a site that was badly affected by Panda in 2011.  I had some success by noindexing genuine duplicates (pages that looked really alike but did need to be there) and removing low quality pages that were old and archived.  I was left with about 60 genuine pages that needed to be indexed and rank well so I had to pay a copywriter to rewrite all those pages (originally we had the same affiliate copy on there as lots of other sites).  That took about 3 months for Google to lift or at least reduce the penalty and our rankings to return to the top 10.

Tom is right that just noindexing is not enough.  If pages are low quality or duplicates then keep them out of sitemaps and navigation so you don't link to them either.  You'll also nned redirects in case anyone else links to them.  In my experience, eventually Google will drop them from the index but it doesn't happen overnight.

Good luck!