Hi All,
I hope this works what I have done is. I looked at my webmastertools account and identified those pages that have obviously too may links about 5 pages have some 1500 links pointing to them. I have made hard 404s. I changed the page urls. I asked google to remove them from the index and I disallowed them in my robots.txt. I am hoping that this will then mean that those incoming links are no longer an issue. I resubmitted my site for inclusion and am waiting on an answer.Apparently this process takes some time
What this means of course is that those pages now have no incoming links so I have to start my seo for them all over again. Very carefully this time.
Of course I am in trouble if there are too many spammy links pointing to my homepage. So I am writing to webmasters of not so good neighbourhood sites and asking them to remove links to my site from theirs.
My google organic traffic is about 1/6 what it was so I have carefully increased adwords spend and am doing heaps more email marketting to keep sales up. BTW have also fired my SEO firm